Macchine imperfette e stupide
Oggi pensavo a come essenzialmente i nostri cervelli siano macchine imperfette e stupide, schiave della chimica.
Quindi — fantascientificamente — se potessimo programmarli per rilasciare dopamina a nostro piacimento, potremmo alterare i gusti e le preferenze degli uomini.
La cosa brutta è che, in quel caso, potremmo essere anche programmati per sviluppare preferenze discutibili (poniamo l’esempio della necrofilia o quello della pedofilia).
Questo non è un problema per individui come il sottoscritto, da sempre geneticamente dotati di un grande senso della moralità, ma potrebbe mettere in difficoltà qualcuno in cui l’area dell’autocontrollo funzioni meno bene.
Volevo spiegare questi concetti a parole mie, ma penso siano già illustrati in modo magistrale in questo libro di John Polito. Il discorso era originariamente riferito allo smettere di fumare, ma può senza dubbio essere esteso.
[…] Our brain dopamine pathways [are] the mind’s survival instincts teacher and motivator.
The primary purpose of that brain circuitry is to make activating events extremely difficult to forget or ignore.
[…] Remember how you felt as a child when first praised by your parents or teachers for keeping your coloring between the lines or for spelling your name correctly? Remember the “aaah” satisfaction sensation? Remember that same feeling after making and bonding with a new friend? “Aaah!”
We had just sampled the mind’s motivational reward for accomplishment and peer bonding. An earned burst of dopamine was followed by an “aaah” wanting satisfaction sensation. It caught our attention, alerted us to what was important, and created a memory of the event that would help establish future priorities.
Bursts of dopamine were also felt when we anticipated accomplishment, peer bonding or other species survival activities. We were now being motivated and working to satisfy dopamine pathway wanting, the “aaah” relief sensation felt when anticipating or experiencing desire’s satisfaction.
[…] Dopamine pathways are present and strikingly similar in the brains of all animals. They originate in the deep inner primitive, compulsive region of the brain known as the limbic mind […] Our dopamine pathways are the source of survival instinct anticipation, motivation and reinforcement. Hard-wired instincts include eating food, drinking liquids, accomplishment, companionship, group acceptance, reproduction and child rearing.
Our brain dopamine pathways cause our compliance with wanting to be recorded in high definition memory, in our forehead just above our eyes (our prefrontal cortex). It’s what researchers call “salient” or “pay attention” memories […] The tease of thousands of old wanting satisfaction memories can be triggered by a physical bodily need, by subconscious habit conditioning, or by conscious concentration, fixation and desire.
Once their collective influence is triggered, as though bombarded by a thousand points of light, we have no choice but to recall exactly what needs to be done in order to satisfy wanting […]
Why can’t we starve ourselves to death? Not only is wanting for food satisfied with dopamine “aaah” relief sensations when we anticipate eating or actually do so, we are punished with anxieties and cravings when we wait too long between meals […]
[What if] our hijacked priorities teacher was fooled and started teaching a false lesson[?]. […] We [would] rationalizedirrational behavior because of the neuro-chemical relief from wanting […]Copyright John R. Polito 2009, 2016
All Rights Reserved
http://whyquit.com/ffn/index.html
(I believe these few lines, excerpted from John Polito‘s book “Freedom from nicotine“, can be reproduced here because of the law on fair use. However I’m not a lawyer, so I might be wrong. In that event, an email will be sufficient for me to remove them as soon as possible. You can read the whole book by visiting the whyquit.com website, and I strongly recommend you do that, since it helped me to a considerable extent when I quit smoking. The book can also be bought on Amazon by clicking here.)
