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Social Media and Endorphins


 Affective neuroscience postulates a neural circuit for the regulation of the mammalian 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 also near 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., it 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 feeds 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.
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  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

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  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

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