Dopamine Dialecticism

A neuro-antistimulant...

Did seeing that headline give you a lil squirt of dopamine? A dribble of serotonin? Would you rather it had inspired a hitherto unknown slathering of some other neurotransmitter soup? Then turn your reading receptors towards the text below and see what we can make you excrete!

Enjoy!

Dopamine Dialecticism

There are a few phrases that strike at something deep in the core of me and insult some inherent sense of order to the extent that I’m overwhelmed by a numb feeling between the eyes, followed by the metallic smell of blood.

One is “they/theming” of individuals with obvious genders out of a sort of performative caution. For example, I will be on a business call with many participants, and someone in chat named “Henry Longfellow” asks a questions of the presenter, who will then say: “Henry has a question, they say…”

There’s just something in this gamification of the language that frustrates me beyond any rational extent. Whatever qualms I have with people insisting on using pronouns which do not align with their biology, I find it genuinely offensive to pretend we are unable to immediately determine the gender of a speaker based on their name, out of a sort of false deference to the handful of people globally who may someday change their desired gender identity.

But the second, and frankly more pervasive linguistic trend that triggers this stroke-like symptom from me is a pop-psych brain theory that has colonized my own mind: the casual labeling of emotions by their associated neurotransmitters.

The form this takes is someone saying they got a “hit of dopamine” at hearing a tingle of music or achieving some goal in a videogame.

My issue with it is that such scientism creates a sort of false specificity. The speaker believes they are describing the direct root cause of their experience, but in actuality they are describing their assumed outcome of an experience. They are adding an intermediate cultural understanding that may be 1) flawed due to the speakers level of mastery of neurotransmitter science and 2) subject to change as our understanding of these chemicals or broad we brain function may deepen or change.

This is a form of second-order observation, that being the concept of observing not the object itself, but rather the observer’s own observation process — in this case our observation that our body is a biological organism responding to hormonal stimuli. In other words, it’s a meta-level observation, where we reflect on how we observe, rather than simply observing either the object or phenomenon, or better yet a more nuanced description of our first order observation, that being our emotional experience in long tested language of “joy”, “terror”, etc.

In short, second-order observation in this situation introduces additional layers of complexity, as we must consider the observer’s role (and scientific beliefs) to interpret their meaning.

Emotions are not merely biochemical reactions, they are complex reflections of personal experience, cultural norms, and a broad spectrum of biological stimuli (senses, blood pressure and organ functioning, and more hormones than most are even aware of).

And so it is my suggestion to anyone reading this to join me in consciously structuring our my own language to focus on the complexity of our own emotion as emotions. Let us celebrate the boundlessness of human experiences by accepting our feelings as they are, and not as subjects to our abstract understandings of internal biological workings.

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