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My Pet Project: Deconstructing the Human Fear-Response
Recent events both here and in my world have given me the occasion to take a long and deep look at a certain part of my brain. The Mind. The conscious brain (the part that is mainly responsible for abstract thought and executive decision-making) is part of the neo-cortex; the frontal lobe. It is the place where the waking you (and the majority of the sleeping you) resides. It is the home of the feedback loop and the part of the mind which rationalises an undone shoelace or a face full of shaken up soda as injurious things. This has been my primary concern for nearly half of my life, what is it precisely that allows this piece of the psyche the final word in many of our decisions? The answer: Fear.
Now this is not a sermon on who to follow or who will save you because I don't even want to pretend to know that answer (if you could even find one) The question is one of freedom of action, Freedom from one's own mental damage. The act of alchemical transformation, which turns the human wreckage that most of us comprise into something that may not be whole, but at least content.
The sticky portion of the problem is this. The Neurotransmitters in the brain which maintain our stress at acceptable levels are also involved in behavioural inhibition, depression (mental and physical), and neophobia. The transmitters which promote the opposite effect comprise less than one quarter (total) of the number of messengers in the brain. What's more when they are present in significant levels to induce change, they are often linked with mental disorders or unhealthy tendencies.
The thing which is the most surprising is this, disciplining the brain (or habituation if you prefer) can actually be enforced by this stress leveling transmitter, no matter what the acceptable level is. I.e. it may be a morning bungee jump, followed by a skydive, then 3 cups of coffee. Or it could just be deliberately forgetting a vitamin supplement. However, unless the stress leveler is lowered or the "upper" Transmitters are raised, changing this behaviour becomes difficult.
Thus, when a mind which becomes habituated to a pattern of behaviour it becomes the norm for the personality, what we expect, and a pattern it is hard to break out of. The reason being, the feedback loop. A part of the mind I feel is neither characterised or adequately explained by current definitions. The feedback loop keeps us locked in behaviours because of fear, it is not what rationalises and categorises our experience but it pulls strings and pushes buttons so that when we experience different situations confront us and at the same time demand our attention, it induces the fear response. Ordinarily (often when it comes to physical things) this is beneficial; i.e. a flaming orange thing descends from the sky and starts hovering over your head and emitting a humming sound. the justification being that if we lack a framework for the event we should exercise caution. However the reaction produced is not one of reservation, but fearful hostility or panic. For instance: This Thursday I arrived at my psych lecture and took my seat, then about halfway through the lecture the girl sitting in the row near me began to have an epileptic fit. I knew immediately what was happening, but as this was the first time I have ever witnessed such an event from right up close, the first thing I did was panic, the second thing I did was panic, then I ended up freezing up. Luckily there were many people nearby who were familiar with such experiences (social workers and nurses), I knew what to do, but all I could do was watch.
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PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO REFLECT AND COGITATE OVER WHAT HAS BEEN SAID. I APPRECIATE HOW DIFFICULT PSYCHOBIOLOGY IS TO UNDERSTAND, THE GOOD NEWS IS; IT IS NOT IMPORTANT TO YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE GIST OF THIS ARTICLE…
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The revelation came in terms of something that was discussed afterward in the lecture, an appropriate time considering after I came back down to earth the first thing I did was say to myself "I froze because I've never seen that before." So anyway... we were discussing brain chemistry, and what got me thinking is drugs. I wasn't taking any, but their effects on the brain got me thinking about behaviour not in terms of chemistry but like a puzzle…
All psychoactive drugs (that is: drugs which affect the brain) involve chemicals which mimic compounds in the brain. There are four basic types but what concerns me are the agonists ("uppers") and antagonists ("downers"). Agonists act just like neurotransmitters, so when they appear in a brain with normal concentrations of agonists we get increased brain activity, muscle spasms, hyperactivity etc. Antagonists meanwhile act to block neural signals resulting in: delayed reaction time, sleepiness, etc. Oddly enough the withdrawal symptoms from addiction to each are reciprocal, (i.e. speed users "crash", and heroin users experience flu-like symptoms (as well as extreme touch sensitivity.) The reason being, the body compensates for the effects of a drug. Thus requiring increasing doses to produce the same effect. Just like we familiarise ourselves with a stressor thus becoming desensitized to it. But juts like the vast numbers of chemicals that we would require to take to "desensitise" our bodies to them, the number of possible fears is infinite. But I was presented a further boon in the form of death.
There is a chemical found in puffer fish called TXE (I believe). It acts as a special type of antgonist; it blocks the ion channels which allow a neuron to transmit information. It bonds permanently and cannot be removed (as far as we know), the result being that if metabolised TXE can kill a human within minutes. This is what got me thinking, we desensitise ourselves to fear in order to deal with a situation, thus creating a "tolerance" to certain levels of fear in certain situations, damaging the feedback loop. Is there a way we can prevent the feedback loop from functioning entirely? Well of course there is, a better question would be: "What are some of the many ways in which the feedback loop can be stopped, allowing the fear response to be properly managed?" See the thing is... the odd thing about the feedback loop, the more aware you become, the more tolerant and less-fearful you are in general the harder it becomes to alter your behaviour. The addiction to fear-reduction, something I have noticed within myself in recent months. How do we sidestep that?
The end result of this process would be a reduced necessity for extreme emotion to provoke change. Change would be easy, it could be conscious, you really could run down the main street smeared in your choice of condiment with a rose between your cheeks, full of your own prismaticism. Though you would possess cares, you wouldn't need to heed them. This would not be disinhibition or fake courage, but existential freedom, the authentic self in action putting it's best foot forward straight into the groin of whatever mores get in its way. The question is, how do we deconstruct the feedback loop with ease rather than doing it one fear at a time?
That's a discourse I leave to you…
You can do it… you've already got a rosebush and a jar of peanut butter, you are discordian after all.
~Smearmy Trollax~