Social Media and Endorphins

 Affective neuroscience postulates a neural circuit for the regulation of the mammal emotion of the social bond.[1] Curiously, this circuit is located in the same cerebral areas where the sexual and the maternal emotions are located, and near also to the processing areas of pain. This circuit is responsible for the distress that mammals suffer from separation (especially in the young ones), but its positive function is related to the experience of pleasure in bonding. The process is mediated by endorphins and oxytocin, like in the maternal emotional system, i.e., is a pleasurable experience. Oxytocin is relevant to the formation of group memories[2], and therefore, to the creation of myths. We are biologically conditioned to be social, as was pointed out by Aristotle in a famous passage of his Politics. In this sense, social media feed upon our needs. They give endorphins and make us addicted to our own opioids and sexual neurotransmitters. But this is not new, is what the group always did, although implies a displacement of the formation of memories and myths from the traditional settings of the geographical city, to an eclectic virtual market realm whose narratives of identity are conditioned by the economy of globalization, which is establishing a mythical–ritual axis with more elements of the plane of the universal law than with those of the plane of the human law, resembling more some sort of new traditional religion: the psychological problems of immortality are left to the old traditions and money regulates the rest of the emotional realm, while the problems of material origins are passed to science.

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[1] See, for instance, Jakk Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press. New York 1998. p.p.262-274.

[2] Panksepp, Ibid.p.272-273.