Have I used that joke before? Whatever.

I have to say, the words, they come slow these last few days. The weather has been summery (for a fucking change) and my mind has gone into vacation mode where it empties itself of all heavy thoughts and shifts into “lazy self-indulgence” mode. This greatly reduces my usually robust supply of surplus thoughts and so I actually have to think of what to say instead of just kind of opening the faucet and letting all the excess mental energy drain onto the page.

That makes blogging feel like actual work. And my silly brain keeps insisting I’m on vacation and don’t have to do any work. I just have to keep myself amused. Like a kid.

So it’s a little bit more of a struggle than usual. I suppose my stimulation level is down too, it being the weekend. That also means that I can’t just talk about my day at school. I have to talk about my day at home, and well, that’s bloody boring. Too boring for this blog, and that’s saying something.

You know what I did yesterday? Did laundry, ate Chinese food, and played Fallout 4. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, I quite enjoyed it, and it helped recharge the ol’ batteries. We all need downtime so we can replenish our stress-depleted supplies of reward stimulus, because without enough reward, we don’t feel like we’re good people.

It really is that simple. People need a certain amount of reward (that is, stimulus to the reward center of the brain) in order to feel good about themselves, and the world, and that is what drives most of what we do. And modern life has a way of draining it out of us because it requires so much self-denial and suppression of instinctual responses. We have a very large amount of complex social information to deal with on a daily basis, and the part of us that is still a primitive primate gets tired of it all and starts to rattle its cage.

So we appease it by trying to balance the drain with various high reward activities. The most common of these, of course, is high reward food and drink. People wonder why these things are so hard to quit. The answer is that you can’t simply excise a huge proportion of your reward stimulus without having something to use as a replacement. And it has to be something that can equal the original reward stimuli in total stimulus if not in stimulus intensity.

Part of the problem is that the stronger the stimuli, the bigger the emotional impression it makes and the harder we lock in to that source of stimulus. That was great back in the state of nature because our taste buds were more or less aligned to what was actually good for us. In the wild, it’s very important to get a lot of calories (sweet), enough salt to be able to do things like manufacture urine and regulate its hydration levels (salty), get enough fat to keep our highly demanding nervous systems working (fatty), and that we get enough protein to keep up with our fairly harsh metabolic demands (umami).

But now, we can create supra-normal stimuli for all these things, and this ultra-strong stimuli leads to ultra strong fixation. Our minds get programmed to demand that extremely high level of stimulation to the reward center, and when we try to diet and start to crave these things, that’s what is going on. Our reward levels are dropping, and the fixation effect makes it very difficult to believe that any other source of reward stimulation will be able to act as a substitute.

Especially not when we know damned well that the thing we crave is easily and readily available.

I just had a scary thought : what if someone invented a substance that stimulated the reward center of your brain directly? A substance that could be added to any food item to make it more rewarding to eat. I can see it starting out as a thing to make healthy food more palatable, but then it would be put in everything just like sugar is, and just like with sugar the amount of it in the public diet would creep up over time.

Especially if it was widely believed to be totally harmless. Something that is either easily and harmlessly metabolized by our bodies, or something that is nutritionally inert like Splenda and just passes right through us. Maybe we would only find out how badly it is fucking us up when it is far too late for us to wean ourselves off the stuff.

Or worse, it could truly be completely harmless, and we could all end up addicted to it without knowing it because it’s in everything… unless we go a couple weeks without it, and then we have harsh psychological withdrawal symptoms when the last of it is out of our systems.

That reminds me of something I saw about treating depression with an implant that stimulates the reward center of the brain electrically. Not to the point of ecstasy, or even happiness. Just a constant low level stimulus to keep the reward level from going below a certain point.

As a depressive, the thought intrigues me. It would certainly be nice to have some sort of solid stimulus upon which to anchor my mood. A lot of my issues boil down to emotional instability, so any stabilizing influence would be welcome.

As a scientist (type), though, I would worry about long term effects. Would we find that the patients’ minds adapt to the new situation just like they do to drugs, and hence build up a tolerance that can only be overcome by increasing the stimulation? Would it have a warping effect on personality, bending people toward arrogance and overconfidence? Or even sociopathy?

I might just have to write a sci fi story in order to figure it all out.

No promises, tho. I got other stuff to write.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.