Posted by JackD on December 21, 2004, at 9:18:32
In reply to Re: Can your brain learn its way around an antidepress, posted by linkadge on December 20, 2004, at 20:02:26
I agree with linkadge, i think the human brain is just hardwired to force itself to go back down from any state of what it feels to be, a "reward" state. I mean think about it, if, evolutionarily speaking, and this is a stretch, when man was first roaming around, and came across food and ate it, and felt happy and content after enjoying his meal, and that feeling just never subsided, he'd kinda just sit there and starve. Ok that's a HORRIBLE example. But I'm sure it's self-evident what I'm trying to explain.
It's like your brain has a mechanism to make sure you always come down from feeling "too good", so that you can go in search of a new thing to satisfy whatever base urges are needed for survival. It's a residual hardwiring that's left over from evolution. I dunno, maybe I've been reading too much of John Lilly's work recently, I'm just ranting now.
Taking an antidepressant kinda artificially pushes your brain beyond how it's wired as it's normal homeostatic level of happiness. It makes it think, like I said before, that it's in a reward-like state and hence the dampening mechanisms kick in and try to push it back down to the set level, even though that level may be incorrect for some people. Does that make sense?
poster:JackD
thread:432111
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20041217/msgs/432406.html