Skip to main content

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.



[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.
Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 12, 2021 at 12:31 PM

    This suggests that alongside Kopimism we are involuntarily walking into our own future nightmare where our emotional state belongs to the creator of the state we embrace

    ReplyDelete
  2. nicole.nklyJuly 13, 2022 at 12:56 PM

    Shocked that this was written so many years ago. Only becomes more and more relevant with time. The extend to which our emotional responses are being abused for the benefit of the big corporations nowadays is frightening

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Please write here your comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is Mythopoetics?

  The narrative grew in the process of being told, as myths always do. The Blog has become more labyrinthine over the years. It contains my Mythopoetics book and a few other things. For those who access these texts without knowing anything about Mythopoetics, I am going to post the introduction of the first part, so you can decide if you want to spend your precious time thinking about the identity narratives that we humans have developed over the years. throughout our eventful existence as a species. "Mythological narratives are the only intellectual activity that has been continuously practiced by human beings, a fact that makes them a unique tool for thinking synthetically our evolution as homo-sapiens. In this sense, they are the first valuation settings that humans have made about themselves and their environment, and as such, they have conditioned the ones that have come afterwards, both in form and content. Their communicative function places them at the basis o...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Epistemological Perspective of Individuation

For the ancient Romans, "Terminus" was the god of boundaries, represented as large stones used to divide and delimit fields. Festivals were held, called Terminalia, in which the stones that "generated" human space were sanctified. Our word "term" is the heir of that god, or better, it is that god incorporated into an everyday space, in our Lebenswelt or world of life. A philosophical term, whatever its semantic content, is the conceptual mark that we make by establishing a referential sign, it is the action of determining, of generating a reference in a mental space, a reference with which we make a sign correspond, or if we deal with a physical space, the correspondence with an object, be it a milestone, a stone, or an indicator sign. Since its beginnings, philosophy has used binary semantic terms as thinking tools, something that analytical psychology has also made good use of. One of the longest-running binary semantic terms for psychology...
Post a Comment
Read more