Molecules of Joy: How Our Brains Make Neural Connections and Form Habits and Intelligence
Hormones affect the mechanisms of emotion formation and the action of various neurochemicals, and, as a result, are involved in the formation of stable habits. The author of the book "Hormones of Happiness", Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Loretta Graziano Breuning, suggests revising our patterns of behavior and learning how to trigger the action of serotonin, dopamine, endorphin and oxytocin.
Shifting neural pathways
Every person is born with many neurons, but very few connections between them. These connections are built as we interact with the world around us and ultimately create us as we are. But sometimes you have a desire to slightly modify these formed connections. It would seem that this should be easy, because they developed with us without much effort on our part in our youth. However, the formation of new neural pathways in adulthood is surprisingly difficult. Old connections are so effective that letting go of them makes you feel as if your survival is at stake. Any new nerve chains are very fragile compared to old ones. When you can understand how difficult it is to create new neural pathways in the human brain,
Five ways your brain self-adjusts
We mammals are able to create neural connections throughout life, unlike species with stable connections. These connections are created as the world around us affects our senses, which send appropriate electrical impulses to the brain. These impulses pave neural pathways along which other impulses will run faster and easier in the future. Each individual's brain is tuned to an individual experience. Below are five ways that experience physically changes your brain.
Life experience isolates young neurons
A constantly working neuron over time becomes covered with a membrane of a special substance called myelin. This substance significantly increases the efficiency of the neuron as a conductor of electrical impulses. This can be compared to the fact that insulated wires can withstand significantly more stress than bare wires. Myelinated neurons work without the extra effort required for slow, "open" neurons. Myelinated neurons appear white rather than gray, so we divide our medulla into "white" and "gray".
Basically, myelin coating of neurons is completed in a child by the age of two, as his body learns to move, see and hear. When a mammal is born, a mental model of the world around it must form in its brain, which will provide it with opportunities for survival. Therefore, the production of myelin in a child is maximal at birth, and by the age of seven it decreases slightly. By this time, you no longer need to re-learn the truth that fire burns, and gravity can make you fall.
When a person reaches puberty, the formation of myelin in his body is again activated. This is due to the fact that the mammal has to re-tune its brain to find the best mate. Often during the mating period, animals migrate to new groups. Therefore, they have to get used to new places in search of food, as well as to new fellow tribesmen. In search of a married couple, people are also often forced to move to new tribes or clans and comprehend new customs and culture. The increase in myelin production during puberty is exactly what contributes to all this. Natural selection arranged the brain in such a way that it was during this period that it changes the mental model of the surrounding world.
Anything that you purposefully and consistently do during your myelinic heyday creates powerful and branched neural pathways in your brain. That is why so often the genius of a person is manifested precisely in childhood. That is why little skiers so dashingly fly past you on mountain slopes that you cannot master, no matter how hard you try. That is why it becomes so difficult to learn foreign languages at the end of adolescence. As an adult, you can memorize foreign words, but more often than not, you cannot quickly pick them up to express your thoughts. This is because your verbal memory is concentrated in thin neurons not covered with myelin. Powerful myelinated neural connections are busy with high mental activity, therefore, new electrical impulses hardly find free neurons. […]
Fluctuations in the activity of the body in myelination of neurons can help you understand why people have certain problems at different periods of life. […] Remember that the human brain does not reach maturity automatically. Therefore, it is often said that the brain in adolescents is not yet fully formed. The brain “myelinates” all of our life experiences. So if in the life of a teenager there are episodes when he receives an undeserved reward, then he firmly remembers that the reward can be received without effort. Some parents forgive their teenagers for bad behavior, saying that "their brains are not fully formed yet." That is why it is very important to purposefully control the life experience that they absorb. If you allow a teenager to avoid responsibility for his actions, then you can form his mind, who will expect the possibility of evading such responsibility in the future. […]
Life experiences improve synapse efficiency
A synapse is a place of contact (a small gap) between two neurons. The electrical impulse in our brain can move only if it reaches the end of the neuron with sufficient force to "jump" over this gap to the next neuron. These barriers help us filter out really important incoming information from irrelevant so-called "noise". The passage of an electrical impulse through synaptic gaps is a very complex natural mechanism. It can be imagined in such a way that a whole flotilla of boats accumulates at the tip of one neuron, which transports the neural "spark" to special receiving docks located near the neuron located nearby. Each time, boats do a better job of transportation. This is why our experience increases the chances of transmitting electrical signals between neurons. There are over 100 trillion synaptic connections in the human brain. And our life experience plays an important role in order to conduct nerve impulses through them in a way that is consistent with the interests of survival.
On a conscious level, you cannot decide which synaptic connections you should develop. They are formed in two main ways:
1) Gradually, through repeated repetition.
2) Simultaneously, under the influence of strong emotions.
[…] Synaptic connections are built on the basis of repetition or emotions that you have experienced in the past. Your mind exists because your neurons have formed connections that represent good and bad experiences. Some episodes of this experience were “pumped” into your brain by the “molecules of joy” or “molecules of stress”, others were anchored in your brain by constant repetition. When the model of the world around you corresponds to the information contained in your synaptic connections, electrical impulses run through them easily, and it seems to you that you are quite aware of the events taking place around you.
Neural circuits are formed only due to active neurons
Those neurons that are not actively used by the brain begin to gradually weaken already in a two-year-old child. Oddly enough, this contributes to the development of his intelligence. The reduction in the number of active neurons allows the baby not to glance absent-mindedly around everything around, which is characteristic of a newborn, but to rely on the neural pathways that he has already formed. A two-year-old is able to independently concentrate on what in the past gave him pleasant sensations, such as a familiar face or a bottle of his favorite food. He may be wary of things that have caused him negative emotions in the past, such as a pugnacious playmate or a closed door. The young brain already relies on its little life experience to meet needs and avoid potential threats.
No matter how neural connections are built in the brain, you feel them as "truth"
Between the ages of two and seven, the child's brain optimization process continues. This forces him to correlate the new experience with the old, instead of accumulating new experiences in some separate block. Closely intertwined neural connections and neural pathways form the backbone of our intelligence. We create them by forking old neural "trunks" instead of creating new ones. Thus, by the age of seven, we usually clearly see what we have already seen, and hear what we have heard once.
You might think this is bad. However, consider the value of all of this. Imagine you lied to a six-year-old child. He trusts you because his brain eagerly absorbs whatever is offered to him. Now, suppose you cheated on an eight-year-old child. He is already questioning your words, because he compares the incoming information with the information he already has, and does not just “swallow” new information. At the age of eight, it is already more difficult for a child to form new neural connections, which pushes him to use the existing ones. Relying on old neural circuits allows him to recognize lies. This was of great importance from the point of view of survival for the time when parents died young and children from an early age had to get used to taking care of themselves. When we are young, we form certain neural connections, allowing others to fade away. Some of them disappear as the autumn leaves are blown away by the wind. This helps make a person's thought process more efficient and focused. Of course, with age, you gain more and more knowledge. However, this new information is concentrated in areas of the brain in which active electrical pathways already exist. For example, if our ancestors were born in hunting tribes, then they quickly gained experience as a hunter, and if in the tribes of tillers - agricultural experience. Thus, the brain was tuned to survive in the world in which they really existed. […] However, this new information is concentrated in areas of the brain in which active electrical pathways already exist. For example, if our ancestors were born in hunting tribes, then they quickly gained experience as a hunter, and if in the tribes of tillers - agricultural experience. Thus, the brain was tuned in to survive in the world in which they really existed.
New synaptic connections are formed between the neurons you actively use
Each neuron can have many synapses because it has many processes or dendrites. New processes in neurons are formed when it is actively stimulated by electrical impulses. As dendrites grow in the direction of the points of electrical activity, they can get close enough that electrical impulses from other neurons can travel the distance between them. Thus, new synaptic connections are born. When this happens, at the level of consciousness, you get a connection between two ideas, for example.
You cannot feel your synaptic connections, but you can easily see it in others. A person who loves dogs looks at the whole world around him through the prism of this attachment. A person fascinated by modern technologies associates everything in the world with them. A lover of politics assesses the surrounding reality politically, and a religiously convinced person - from the standpoint of religion. One person sees the world positively, the other negatively. No matter how neural connections are built in the brain, you do not feel them as numerous processes, similar to the tentacles of an octopus. You experience these connections as "truth."
Emotion receptors develop or atrophy
In order for an electrical impulse to cross the synaptic cleft, the dendrite on one side must eject chemical molecules that are captured by special receptors in another neuron. Each of the neurochemicals produced by our brain has a complex structure that is perceived by only one specific receptor. It approaches the receptor like a key to a lock. When you are overwhelmed with emotion, more neurochemicals are produced than the receptor can capture and process. You feel overwhelmed and disoriented until your brain creates more receptors. This is how you adapt to the fact that "something is happening around you."
When a neuron's receptor is inactive for a long time, it disappears, leaving room for other receptors that you may need to appear. The flexibility in nature means that receptors in neurons must either be used or they can be lost. "Hormones of joy" are constantly present in the brain, searching for "their" receptors. This is how you "recognize" the reason for your positive feelings. The neuron “fires” because the right hormone molecules open the lock on its receptor. And then, based on this neuron, a whole neural circuit is created that tells you where to expect joy in the future.
