November 27, 2006
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Topic: A deep philosophical, psychological, neurobiological question
When something good happens (our sports team wins, a girl/guy calls, you get the job), you feel happy. The question I have is…do you feel happy because the good thing happened, and then serotonin and other happy chemicals flood the brain, or do these chemicals flood the brain and then we feel happy? Or put another way, what causes our happiness, events or chemicals, or some combination of the two?
I’m wondering because in reading a children’s book about a little boy who gets frustrated often, I’m wondering if a bad event triggers unhappiness which triggers depressive chemicals, or does the event trigger the chemicals first which causes the unhappiness.
Finally, the fact that certain events result in feeling happy or sad, has to do with some internal logic of what is good or bad for a person. To what extent can people learn to alter their logic, versus to what extent is our logic wired.
For example, if a close relative gets sick, we feel pain. How did this come to be? Could bad experiences be associated with positive chemicals, and vice-versa?
Comments (1)
from what I understand, it is heavily “hard-wired” – bad events cause “Seratonin Re-uptake” (which is why anti-depressants are “SSRIs” – Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors) thus depriving us of the “feel good” chemical. Obviously some people’s brains “manage this” better than others, but no one is immune from it.