I Get No Kick from Cocaine (5 August 2009)

And mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all, but I get a kick.... As it happens, science eventually catches up. This time it’s with Cole Porter, who seems to have understood how the brain’s pleasure centers work long before science was able to figure it out. In The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, Norman Doidge clarifies the role of the brain’s pleasure centers on emotion and learning. The pleasure centers, part of the limbic system, are responsible for good feelings, up to and including orgasm. While most of us already know that orgasms feel good, the big discovery (first made in 1954) is that stimulating the pleasure centers (the mesolimbic dopamine system) enhances learning. The better you feel, the more quickly and easily you learn. Interestingly enough, the reverse is also true.

Cocaine is addictive in part because it turns on the pleasure centers, making everything seem more enjoyable. Cocaine lowers the threshold at which the “joy synapses” fire. The cocaine effect wears off, however, because dopamine production thrives on novelty. According to Doidge, “We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless—a protest, perhaps, of the pastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task” (p. 116).

Doidge also points out that, in addition to the neurotransmitter dopamine, the neuromodulator oxytocin is required for the brain plasticity in learning something new. Dopamine provides the excitement; oxytocin provides the commitment. It really is a remarkable system. Now, if only we could learn how best to use it....

One of the first NLP jokes was that the user manual for the human brain was tossed out with the placenta. Fortunately, the human brain is a little like really good computer software. When you pay close attention to the results you are getting, you can figure out whether what you are doing is working well. If not, you can choose to try a new approach. Although knowing a little about neurology and brain chemistry helps understand how the brain works, it isn’t essential. These days, most of us use computers without having a good understanding of how operating systems work, and people—at least some people—have been getting good results without knowing a thing about brain chemistry. They just pay close attention to what makes them and others feel good.

This seems simple enough. Unfortunately, as Doidge and others have pointed out, synapses that fire together, wire together. Sadomasochistic behavior results when pleasure and pain synapses are fired together. If you’re not a fan of whips, chains, and extreme bondage, you may think that the term doesn’t apply to you. If you hope to gain the pleasures of being thin by enduring the pain of dieting, or if you are following the “no pain, no gain” route to physical fitness, think again. The term, “sadomasochism,” covers more territory than it is given credit for.

Have you ever lost a friend (at least temporarily) because being right was more important to you than being connected? That’s dopamine without the mitigating quality of oxytocin. Have you ever felt that you couldn’t express your point of view and remain connected with someone? That’s oxytocin without the mitigating quality of dopamine. These aren’t always easy brain chemicals to navigate. It’s hard to say whether President Obama’s beer party actually enabled Professor Gates and Officer Crowley to bring their dopamine and oxycontin levels into balance, but I suspect that it is in better balance now than it was while Gates was wearing handcuffs and being pushed into the back of a police cruiser.

One of the best ways to learn how to control your brain chemicals and activate your pleasure centers is by becoming aware of the degree to which you are choosing which chemicals are influencing you at any given time. While you can’t choose the chemicals directly, you can choose them by controlling the submodalities you use to represent (re-present) your ongoing experiences in life.

Your sensory experiences include visual and auditory images and kinesthetic sensations (touch, taste, smell, and emotional responses). When you think about anything, you use the same brain circuits to re-present it. But ... and here’s the catch. The way you re-present your life experiences is altered—sometimes just a little, sometimes a lot—by the way you use those sensory components. That’s submodalities at work. If you remember a happy experience, for example, and take the visual image of it, and make it darker and smaller and push it off in the distance, you may notice that the memory seems less happy than it did. Bring the image back, make it even brighter and larger than it was before, and you may notice that your good feelings increase.

That one mind experiment may be all you need to be convinced that the more you know about how to choose the submodalities of your memories, the better off you will be. Most books about NLP contain materials on the fundamentals of submodalities. Debra and I cover them in Chapter 8 of Healing with Language: Your Key to Effective Mind-Body Communication.

It also happens to be the theme of this month’s SCS/NLP Super Sunday (23 August). To sign up for the training, send a brief e-mail message to debra@scs-matters.com.

joel@scs-matters.com
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