Dopamine

Imagine a life without dopamine... Or in other words... a life without passion. What would happen? In an interview with the writer of "Sapiens", he suggested a hypothetical scenario, where a group of aliens visit the earth 100 thousand years ago, and bet on if they came back to earth after thousand of years which species -among the ones they see- would be the most abundant on the planet.

Here, most scientific answers would predict dolphins or huge elephants, where they're strong, smart, and cooperative animals. But after these hundred thousand years, if we kept going with the scenario, and the aliens revisited, to see which of the species they bet on won, they would find the one dominating the planet is the human being. The peripersonal is the world between your hands already, where everything is in your reach. Like your Nescafe mug, your bed, your bathroom, or anything that you don't require effort or planning to obtain. The brain deals with these things through hormones like Oxycontin, they're things that gives us satisfaction, happiness, and enjoying what we have. Satisfaction hormone. Transmitters that care about what we have with us. On the other hand, we have the Extra Personal, which is anything far from our reach, starting from the A+ you can't get up to the most complex inventions that started as ideas. An idea that belongs to a future that isn't here yet, and here, the brain deals with any idea that belongs to that future and needs effort and planning, with the dopamine hormone. It's the hormone that tells you that if you did that, you'll get a reward.Although dopamine helped humans in staying and spreading on earth, it isn't exclusive to humans. Studies confirm that the cycles of dopamine and reward are in most mammals and even in invertebrates. One might ask, then why are humans the only ones with civilization on the planet, if all these species also have dopamine? One of the most important dopamine secretors is the Ventral Tegmental Area, which is deep inside the brain and responsible for desire. One of its receptors is the Nucleus Accumbent, when the dopamine migrates like humans and goes from the Ventral Segmental Area to the Nucleus Accumbent, it makes a Desire Circuit, or the pure feeling of stimulation, as if the brain is a small kid saying that you need that and that, but the difference, as humans, is that dopamine keeps going till it reaches the Frontal Lobes, the part responsible for logical thinking, to create an additional cycle called the Control Circuit.

Humans made it happen with an interesting primitive stimulation system. This system is based on desire and reward, before even understanding these concepts. I like it when biology is ahead of intellectuality, when our bodies reach stages, and thousand of years later our mind discover them and structure the society based on them, I just feel happy and satisfied. With the system combining desire, reward, and control, humans created civilization. This made us as humans not just creatures with only desire, but ones who can take this desire, plan it, and plan obtaining it through a logical serial thinking, till we achieve it.