Still Alive

As Alive As You Need Me To Be

Dusting Off

No, I have not abandoned you, my dear readers.

It seems in the past months of inactivity I have passed the 300 subscribers mark. 322, to be precise, at the time of writing. Hooray! And thank you very much.

I’ve been down a neuroscience rabbit hole for the past few months, and uh, got a bit carried away (2k+ pages of notes). I was curious about the functioning of a few high-leverage brain regions and behaviorally relevant interventions for a specific class of phenotypes.

Specifically, I wanted a mechanical understanding of procrastination (and other behavioral biases and dysfunctions), which is typically an emotional problem, not simply a lack of willpower, or a matter of laziness and distraction, and I wanted to understand why high serotonin states tend to feel quite bad for me. It’s not “the happy hormone”, this is an absurd and utterly ridiculous mischaracterization of its function. Consequentially, devised a few simple, safe, synergistic, and affordable interventions for me that are meant to, well, fix my personality and cognitive-behavioral issues. Very fun stuff.

I’ve been working on a neurofinancial model of human action, and another more conceptual, user-friendly model to address and debug motivation specifically, and to organize my thoughts and independent study on the matter. Neurofinance is not as fanciful as it sounds, because both components of the term fundamentally deal with stochastic control problems under uncertainty. Nor is it intended as mere metaphor, I’m speaking of homology, of structural and relational isomorphism.

The basic idea of what worked for me, which surprisingly enabled me to quit both nicotine and amphetamines, is that plasticity works in a cycle. The typical order of events is, more or less, that some goal is selected, action is performed, and once the goal is achieved, plasticity is activated to enable the organism to adapt and more effectively exploit some environmental opportunity, this leading to a cascade of secondary effects that assist in this process. Though plasticity is associated with learning which in turn we tend to associate with creativity, imagination, and so on, it is mechanically opposed to such things to some extent for the simple reason that you don’t want to end up learning the wrong thing, you need direction and taste, not everything considered should become permanent, which means that plasticity is very much tied up with motivation. As plasticity is activated, action has to become more directed and purposeful, so that the learning process can function as intended.

Therefore, with chemical assistance, we can shortcut the order of events. Instead of action leading to plasticity, which is of course a sequence harder to attain in demotivated states like depression, we force plasticity to activate, with the side effect of enhanced focus and bias towards action. With some skill and preparation, this initiates a feedback cycle that can push one out of his rut. It’s like we’re buying plasticity on credit, but that entails financial responsibility, the investment has to pay off.

That makes this strategy, on the one hand, more elegant than the brute force monoamine dump of stimulants, but on the other hand more demanding, it’s not just fire and forget, you have to set your mind to it. It has worked shockingly well for me so far.

I’ll be going into more detail on this, including my typical idiosyncratic schizo nonsense take on things, in this case the way I think of neuroscience, of the mechanics of human cognition (modestly, a small but significant and broadly attractive and relevant portion of it). Am also finally pushing out far too many drafts.

Thank you for your patience.