NeuroTransmitters Dopamine and Serotonin Explain Habit Formation And Breaking

Neurologically speaking, dopamine and serotonin are two of the primary NeuroTransmitters. Really Neuro-Psychology is a complex game, involving many potential variables and interactive mechanisms. Nonetheless, I am writing this to provide some basic NeuroLogical structure to this common knowledge of the brain, and the nervous system.

Now, let us explore the repetition of habit vs. novelty, and our pursuit and avoidance of each. These basic principles would hold true in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Dopamine, Dopa, sets off our projected fulfillment mechanisms. Based on past conditioning, we create an ‘object’ or ‘process’ to associate with the essential want or need that we feel. When we see a girl who we find attractive, we begin getting excited. We have been conditioned to be attracted to this ‘object’, or ‘process,’ and the dopamine starts going off when it is perceived as being possible.

Now, Serotonin is designed to associate with actual experiences of pleasure. When you are actually being fulfilled in your desires, the serotonin starts flowing. Now, you may perceive something you desire, and start using up some Dopamine. But if you are not being fulfilled, not getting that Serotonin kick, you’re gonna trend towards what they call ‘novelty addiction.’ Novelty is basically good, it is only ‘bad’ when we cannot be fulfilled in our desires. Thus the push is to deny our desires, rather increase the potential for fulfilling those desires. This is where we go wrong as a society. And, looking at these basic principles of Neuro-Psychology, we can describe its process and reasoning intelligently and specifically.

Evolution Of Internet: Expanded

In terms of social networking, there would have to be a comfort in actually engaging with new people. It would facilitate more ‘natural’ interaction. As it currently stands, in the social networking scene, there are three primary possibilities of interaction. One is insignificant crap that has miniscule meaning even on the site, and leads to nothing. Another is interaction with people you already know. Another is awkward attempts at communicating with people you do not know, which has some arbitrary and random possibility of success, usually low. It seems to me that for social networking, in the sense of actually meeting and forming relationships with new people, there MUST BE more depth added to it, and some structure based on interests and the like. Practically the only meaningful relationships I have ever made on the internet have been through forums. It is in this forum setup that people are capable of truly getting to know each other. Social networking is always surface level interaction. A huge part of your feelings about an unknown person on a social networking site are bound to be determined by their pictures, and you’re going to have to say something either awkward, cheesy, or boring to initiate communication. This is not conducive to forming meaningful relationships.

Now I speak here of meaningful relationships, but I am not implying that in-depth intimate relationships are the only ones of value. For instance, let us consider sexual encounters. In this world of sexual repression, the internet is astounding in its possibilities for facilitating sexual encounters. As it is, it is practically laughable how terribly things are set up in this department. In terms of sexuality, the diversity of possibilities is very sparse. You basically have porn, nearly asexual social networking sites, dating sites, and some more sexually-oriented social networking sites. Porn is nice primarily in that it increases your sexual imagination, and thus sexual energies. It does little in the way of real world fulfillment, however. It’s all people you’ll never meet. One may think that social networking would be great for meeting new people for potential romantic/sexual encounters, and there are millions who wish this was the case, but in reality this does not work out very well.

Established social networking sites, such as facebook, work almost entirely through interaction with people you already know. It may be useful for improving an established relationship, but it is highly ineffective at facilitating new relationships. The greatest sexual fulfillment on these sorts of sites, beyond potentially improving an established relationship, is someone you find attractive uploading a semi-revealing picture. No nudity is allowed, and there seems to be a fairly widely accepted taboo against intentionally being sexy in pictures. Generally when people put up these semi-revealing pictures, they do it under a guise of innocence, almost as if they are unaware that the picture is revealing. This is the result of the basic fact that social networking sites are nearly asexual. They are not conducive to direct sexuality. There are dating websites, and some of these are fine for attempting to establish long-lasting monogamous relationships, I’m sure, but I’m equally sure that these are far too ‘serious’ for what many people are looking for. Then you have the ‘adult-oriented’ social networking sites, which are failures to the point that they are hardly worth mentioning. These tend to be explicit in their sexual nature, and you seemingly ALWAYS have to pay to be a part. This amounts to people paying in order to have sexual encounters, and this is not the sort of thing that many people are comfortable with.

So we have here went to two ends of the spectrum. On one hand we have in-depth connections, where you truly get to know and appreciate others. On the other hand we have casual sexuality. Neither of these are being facilitated particularly well on the internet-as-it-is, and I would like to bring this whole spectrum of interaction into one medium. Although they would be a part of one medium, they would not be directly intertwined. There would be the possibility of crossing over between these aspects, but they would be distinct. There would be different ‘sections’ of the site for different sorts of relationships. Looking ahead, from my current point of view, I can break this down into three primary sections. One is where an individual wants to share something SHe has done, and maybe get feedback. With this, it is basically about you. You’re not so much trying to start a dialogue, but rather share. We can tenatively call this ‘blogging.’ Another section would be designed for actual conversation. There would be a whole range of possible depths to these conversations. There could be anything from in-depth philosophic or political discussions/debates to any sort of casual topic of conversation. We can call this the ‘forum’ interface. Next we have the more casual yet personal environment of ‘social networking.’ Here people share any sort of basic things that they may casually share with friends. In the current social networking scene, we would think of this as things like like status’, pictures, etc. As I say, this is both the most personal and casual environment. It would be primarily for use of people you wanted to get to know on a ‘real’ or personal level, but for in-depth interaction you would not want to limit yourself to this environment.

Now, we would attempt to create a system within all of these ‘sections’ where there would be broad categories along with increasingly specific classifications. You would select the broad categories which were of interest, and then proceed to either select more specific classifications or learn over time what specific categories were of primary interest to you. You would be asked to rate things after being shown them, including options like ‘not sure’ or ‘doesn’t fit my interests.’ There could be some sort of tracking system on the site that shows you your most used categories, as well as rating trends within these various categories. This could give you insight into what your favorite categories are, as well as categories that may not be of the level of interest that you had thought. There would be a database of the ratings that all of the various users gave out, as well as each user’s favorite categories. The system would be set up, either through some sort of coding or through human analysis, to track common relationships between various categories. This would be for the purpose of developing a ‘You may also be interested in…’ sort of thing. Potential unknown interests would be recommended to you not only by other categories that other people who share common categories of interest with you are interested in, but it would be further filtered through a process which would favor individuals who have rated things within those categories similarly to you.

Now as I speak of these ‘categories,’ the most natural interpretation may lead you to think of reading/viewing things in the blogging interface, or topics of conversations in the forum interface, due to the impersonal sound of the word. However, I would seek to employ this same basic system with social interacting. It gets quite interesting and unique here, because in some ways it causes us to question the very nature of our humanity and our interactions. Each individual would determine ‘categories’ of interest for people to interact with. This means basic personality types, various physical traits, whatever. You would determine the ‘types’ of people you were interested in meeting, or your basic feelings about these different ‘types.’ Interactions would be faciliated through the ways in which everyone was categorized by others, as well as the ways they were ‘rated’ in terms of these categories. These would be kept anonymous. This is so that people feel comfortable being honest in their assessment of others, and also so that people are comfortable and confident in being themselves, without needing to conform to others standards. This self-confidence and ease of interaction would continuously be improved, because the social setting would be continuously improved as well, by means of facilitating interaction with ideal people.