Massive Income

Wanting and liking, Part 11

Ecstasy, lacking the hungriness of the desire-driven opiates, and promoting harmony and solidarity amongst its party-going users, might seem like a dream narcotic. However, the hang-over began in the 1990s. MDMA causes damage to brain cells in experimental animals, and soon evidence began to accumulate of memory impairments in users of Ecstasy. Moreover, though the drug provides a short-term boost in serotonergic transmission, it leaves the opposite effect as it wears off. By mid-week, regular users show evidence of low mood, depression, and aggression, dispelled, presumably, only by the next weekend’s dose.

There is another class of serotonin-related drugs: the hallucinogens, such as LSD. LSD is chemically related to serotonin. It is not just modern chemists who have discovered the psychological significance of serotonin. Indigenous peoples in many locations have refined compounds resembling serotonin from sources as diverse as cactus (mescaline), mushrooms (psilocybin), and the vine that gives native South Americans ayahuasca. The effects of these drugs are somewhat different from those of Ecstasy, with a greater emphasis on hallucination, but the feeling of expansiveness and selftranscendence is shared. Among native Ecuadorians and Peruvians, there is a tradition of using ayahuasca in the contexts of healing, self-discovery, worship, and shamanism, and LSD, too, was experimented with in the context of psychotherapy.

The modulation of positive and negative emotion systems seems also in part to be a modulation between the left and right sides of the brain. Recall that a circuit including the amygdala seems to be responsible for the emotional tagging of experiences. The amygdala further connects to areas of the frontal lobes. When smiling in response to an amusing film clip, subjects show enhanced brain activity across the left hemisphere, and reduced activity across the right, compared to when they are reacting to a disgusting clip. When volunteers in PET studies were made to feel sad by watching a film clip or being asked to generate sad memories, one locus of increased activation was in the right frontal cortex, and the same finding has come from comparing depressed patients with normal volunteers with the brain at rest.

Similarly, the relative strength of left and right frontal brain activation before an experiment has begun is a good predictor of the way a person will respond to an emotional experience. People with an excess of left hemisphere activity will respond in a strongly positive way to positive film clips, whereas people with an excess of right hemisphere activity will respond in a strongly negative way to negative ones. Thus, the balance of activity in the brain at rest must reflect the person’s emotional ‘preset’, which is presumably in turn controlled by serotonergic circuits. This would seem to lead to the hypothesis, untested to my knowledge, that d-fenfluramine or an SSRI should shift the balance brain activation from the right to the left frontal lobes.

Taken from : “Happiness” The Science Behind Your Smile

Wanting and liking, Part 10

At the extreme of the low-serotonin spectrum are the clinical disorders of negative emotion, namely depression and anxiety disorder. There is some debate about whether these are simply an extreme of the adaptive range, or whether in these cases the mechanism really has gone wrong. I tend to favour the latter possibility, since the long-term hopelessness, destruction and passivity of clinical depression seem unlikely to be related to anything that could be beneficial. It could be that what happens is that mechanisms that could have been adaptive for brief bouts in our ancestors (sit tight and don’t do anything) become instead chronically activated in some people, to the point where they are pathologies. Antidepressants and psychotherapy are ways of trying to disengage this activation.

If this view of the serotonin system’s function is correct, then we should be able to make some predictions about drugs of abuse that mimic a serotonin shot. First, they should produce more of a relaxed, disinhibited sense of well-being than the euphoria rush of cocaine or heroin. Second, they should not be directly addictive in the way that the dopamine drugs are, since they are not operating primarily on the wanting system, but on the system that shifts away from negative emotions to positive ones. Of course, addiction could still occur, but it would be indirect—i.e. via the positive feelings induced—rather than chemically direct.

Such a drug exists, and its name is, aptly enough, Ecstasy. Ecstasy, whose active ingredient is a chemical
called MDMA, has a very illuminating history. A powerful releaser of serotonin, it was first synthesized many
decades ago, but did not immediately find a niche. In the psychedelic 1960s and 1970s, its use was seriously advocated as adjunct to psychotherapy. This is because it produces a powerful feeling of well-being, insight, and compassion. In the 1980s, it began to spread seriously as a recreational drug, associated with an expanding and vibrant dance culture. It was criminalized in the 1980s, but this only seems to have accelerated its spread, with millions of tablets being taken every weekend across the developed world.

Taken from : “Happiness” The Science Behind Your Smile

THE BRIDGE FOR ADVERTISERS AND BLOGGERS

If you are interested in making a big amount of money in easy way, you can take a look at the way to make money by blogging online in the website at BuyBlogReviews.com. The website is connecting advertiser and bloggers to work together for each party’s advantages. Through the website, the advertisers can search for bloggers and the bloggers can search for the job they want.

As the advertiser, you can get profitable blog advertising by using the bloggers to promote your products. It is the new way to promote your blog and all its content. The bloggers will write about your products and services according to your guidance so that you will get more traffic coming into your website. You can also get higher search engine rankings and get satisfying result of your products marketing.

For bloggers, you can get paid blogging by writing about the advertisers’ products. Moreover, you can write only about the things that you like; you are free to choose among the tasks and jobs available. You will get paid per post, so you will gain more money with more post you write. You can also register your blog for free through the website. Get started now and experience valuable feedback.

Wanting and liking, Part 9

Serotonin-boosting drugs affect behaviour in precisely the way you would expect if they were shifting the relative weighting of the negative and positive emotion systems. They reduce worry, fear, panic, and sleeplessness. They increase sociability, co-operation and positive emotion. Most intriguingly, serotonin in wild monkeys has been shown to be related to social position. Low-ranking individuals have high levels of stress hormones and relatively low concentrations of blood serotonin. High-ranking individuals on the other hand, spend more time grooming, have lower stress hormones, and higher serotonin. And in a troupe with no alpha male, a subordinate given Prozac will rise to alpha status.

This puts a new perspective on the function of serotonin systems. It is tempting to think of the lowserotonin syndrome as simply a pathology, the brain going wrong. But in fact, the monkey studies suggest that it is based on a system that is adaptive. For the lowranking monkeys, it is optimal to shift the balance towards the negative emotions. They have more to worry about, and if they are not careful, they will end up dead or ostracized from the group. Similarly, their high levels of stress are not a pathology as such. They need to reallocate resources from long-term problems such as social grooming and tissue repair to the immediate
issues of remaining intact. Stress hormones mobilize the body’s resources in this way.

There are some human parallels to this situation. Moving from one social group to another is very stressful, and new and insecure employees think in more paranoid ways than established and tenured ones. The lower people are on the socio-economic hierarchy, the higher they score on scales of anxiety and depression. In part they are right to do so: they have more to worry about. Long-term health is potently affected by social status, even though the advances in medicine and wealth of the last few decades mean that the poorest people today have objective conditions much better than the richest of a few generations ago. But having the most insecure place in society is still a potent initiator of a serotonergically mediated shift from positive,
low-stress mode to negative, high-stress mode.

Taken from : “Happiness” The Science Behind Your Smile

Wanting and liking, Part 8

These studies have told us something about the brain basis of desire and pleasure, but, happiness is distinct from either of these. What soma produced was a feeling of calm, satisfaction, and well-being. This is where the serotonin system comes in.

As we saw, directly increasing serotonin activity in the brain through d-fenfluramine leads to a reduction in the type of thinking that goes with negative emotions such as worry and fear. Serotonin-enhancing drugs are effective in reducing depression, but also in reducing anxiety, phobias, and shyness. They can even be used to treat obsessive–compulsive disorder. This is a condition in which the person feels compelled to repeat certain thoughts and actions, such as checking rituals, or washing of the hands. This can be thought of in some respects as a type of anxiety, since often the person is worried about negative consequences that will ensue if the ritual is not done. Thus, the serotonin-boosting drugs seem able to disengage negative emotion systems. Similarly, studies have found evidence in the blood or brains of depressed, suicidal, and violent individuals that serotonin activity is unusually low.

So what is the serotonin system doing? This issue is not as yet entirely clear, but one possibility is that serotonin is the currency of particular brain circuits that modulate the balance between positive and negative emotions. Clearly, in life, positive and negative motivations need to be weighed up against one another, and the optimal balance depends on the context. A monkey finding fruit has a dilemma; how much effort to put into gorging himself and how much into looking out for predators. The optimal balance depends on the context. On open ground the negative systems should probably predominate, however tempting the morsel, whilst safe up a tree hedonism is the order of the day.

More importantly, the right balance of negative and positive emotions depends on the monkey. A lowranking newcomer from outside the group has to becareful above all, because if he feasts he may get beaten up by the others. On the other hand, the alpha female can stroll in, fearing nothing from her sorority and relatively little from predators, since she will no doubt end up in the safest position at the centre of the troupe.

Taken from : “Happiness” The Science Behind Your Smile

Wanting and liking, Part 7

Drugs like heroin and morphine (opiates) mimic the body’s own opioids, and this is thought to be the basis of the euphoria they produce. Opiates and opioids are also powerful painkillers. This is a very interesting phenomenon. As I argued in an earlier chapter, the function of positive emotions such as pleasure is to make you ignore conflicting demands and continue with an activity that is doing you good. Thus it makes sense to have opioids, which are released by a pleasurable activity, dampen down other signals that may be competing for your attention. When you are finally getting intimate with the mate of your dreams, you don’t want to be thinking of food or your bruised knee. Magnify this effect up with an artificial opiate at hundreds of times natural concentrations, and you have morphine analgaesia.

Opioid and dopamine systems are reciprocally connected, and by the same token, wanting and liking usually go together. A recent study of hospitalized heroin addicts suggests how these interactions might work. The participants could work to receive an injection, which in some conditions was morphine and in some just saline solution. To get the solution, they had to press a lever three thousand times in 45 minutes. They also rated the injections they received, in terms of how much pleasure they gave, whether they thought the injection contained any drug, and so on. At moderate doses of morphine, participants rated the injections as pleasurable, and worked at lever pressing to get them. In the saline condition, they rated the injections as worthless and no good, and wouldn’t press the lever. At a very low concentration of the drug, they still rated the injection worthless and no good, but they worked just as hard at lever pressing to get the solution injected as in the high-dose conditions. In other words, the low concentration did enough to activate the wanting system, but not enough to activate the liking system.

These drugs are all (magnified) mimics of our natural response to things that have been good for us over evolutionary time, like sex, good food, water, and escape from danger. The studies suggest that in the natural system too there could be interesting disconnections between desire and pleasure. Something that is strongly and directly fitness-enhancing like mating with someone one is attracted to is likely to do enough to activate both wanting and liking. Thus we will both feel good at the time and want to do it again (and somehow forget that we have a bruised knee, because of the opioid analgaesia). Something that is weakly fitnessenhancing, like for example, a slight rise in income or social status, might be a strong enough reward to engage the wanting system, but not enough to bring on the pleasure. This would account for the observation that we often work hard in life for things that turn out not to increase either pleasure or happiness. Like addicts, we somehow feel compelled to do so.

Taken from : “Happiness” The Science Behind Your Smile

Wanting and liking, Part 6

With a little care, you can reliably judge how positive a rat’s response to food is, by minutely observing behaviours as it takes the food. When it likes something, it laps and licks its paws. When it dislikes something, it shakes its head and rubs its face. When stimulation is applied to the lateral hypothalamus, the rat eats more, but its facial reaction shows that it doesn’t enjoy it any more. Indeed, judging from the facial reactions, the animals actually dislike the food they are so motivated to seek. Conversely, when dopamine-blocking drugs are used to shut the system down, rats will starve even when surrounded by mountains of tasty food. However, if a sweet solution is diffused onto their tongues, their facial reactions show that they take the normal pleasure in the taste once it gets there. In other words, mechanisms that control the wanting of things are not identical to those that control the liking of them once they arrive. The two are after all logically quite distinct. You could crave for something very much, but take little or no pleasure in it once you had it.

There are examples from human psychology of the separation between wanting and liking. As we have seen, people are not very good at predicting the impact of attaining their desires on their feelings of happiness, imaging unrealistically large positive change when something sought after comes to pass. This may be because we confuse the fact that we want something with the assumption that we will therefore be happy when we get it. The drugs of abuse that act on dopamine systems all share the characteristic of being highly
addictive, but not all of them are actually very enjoyable. Nicotine, for example, produces far too little pleasure for this to be a satisfactory account of why people are addicted to it. These drugs stimulate the wanting system, making them the perfect selfmarketing products. If you are a smoker, you have been duped by chemistry into spending a lot of time and money on doing something you don’t actually enjoy.

The dopamine system interacts with a class of brain chemicals called opioids, because of their similarity to opium (artificially made substances of this class are called opiates, whilst opioids are the natural ones). Opioids do seem to be directly involved in pleasure. They are released in the rat brain by sweet tastes. The injection of opiates into wide areas of the rat brain results in both more eating and more positive behaviours towards the food. And in humans, taking an opioid-blocking drug makes things that are usually delicious seem less so.

Taken from : “Happiness” The Science Behind Your Smile

Fun and Safe Halloween Party for Your Children

As parents, we should concern about our children’s safety and comfort at any occasion including Halloween party. Choosing a scary costume for your children might be fun for parents, but some children have difficult time telling fantasy from reality that make them cared with scary costumes they should wear. Instead of making or purchasing scary costume, why don’t you let them choose and pick their costume’s theme from their story book or favorite action figures? You can check out at costumecauldron.com and have a good time of choosing and finding the best costumes that your children will be love to wear.

You can find the Halloween costumes with various themes including historical figure or animals, characters from film, television, or comic books in many size and unique design that will not only suitable for your children but for adult too. Navigate trough the website to search by category or use the search box and type the particular keyword of costume theme, to find the products that match your need. The wide variety of masquerade items, costumes and other products that complete with the accessories will make you or your children be the tar of any party and win any costume contest. The costumes offered in this website are 0% sales tax free for every order.

Before letting your children attending any Halloween party, you should make sure that their costume will not bring any danger to your children. Check the flame resistant label on the costumes and don’t let your children wear costumes that made with flimsy materials and outfits with big, baggy sleeves or billowing skirts. Also take extra attention for the accessories including costume jewelry, wigs, wings, robes, capes, horns, tiaras, swords and knifes that should made from soft and flexible material. Never let your children use tight mask that will restrict their breathing or obscure vision. By concerning every aspect of your children’s Halloween costume safety, you will be ensured that the children will have a safe and fun Halloween Party.

Wanting and liking, Part 5

Perhaps most striking of all is the phenomenon known as ‘brain stimulation reward’. When tiny electrodes are implanted into certain regions of the brain, animals become addicted to the electrical activity they can provide. Passing a small electric current through an area of the brain simulates—or exaggerates—the effects of that brain area being very active in normal brain functioning. There is one area in particular, the lateral hypothalamus, where rats or monkeys will do anything to get the electricity turned on. If the current is turned on intermittently, then other ‘pleasure’ behaviours such as eating or sex are increased. If the current is made to depend on pressing a lever, the animals will spend most of their time and energy on lever pressing. In fact, they will press the lever three thousand times to get a volley of stimulation. Working for this reward, they will ignore sexually receptive members of the opposite sex, food, or even water, in their singleminded quest for the hit.

This experiment is for obvious reasons difficult to replicate in humans, but it has been done. In the 1960s and 1970s, brain surgery was considered an option for severe epilepsy and other neurological conditions, and sometimes for psychiatric disorders too. Usually as a prelude to destroying or disconnecting particular regions of brain tissue, surgeons would implant tiny electrodes into different regions of the brain and pass electric current through them. An array of sub-cortical areas, generally the human equivalents of the rat mid-brain reward pathways, produced feelings of well-being when stimulated. The feelings ranged from the relief of anxiety, to curiosity, to general benevolent calm, to an euphoria described as close to orgasm. Patients allowed to self-administer the stimulation would do so just like the rats. Electrical stimulation of the brain is thus a possible avenue for the treatment of depression. Less invasive versions are being investigated. In transcranial magnetic stimulation, for example, coils are placed on the outside of the head, and these are used to induce electrical changes in brain tissue by creation of a magnetic field. There is no surgery or direct electric shock to the skull. The technique is in its infancy, but there is some evidence that it can be helpful in the treatment of depression.

The lateral hypothalamus, which is the main site of brain stimulation reward in the rat, connects directly to the nucleus accumbens dopamine system. In fact, rats will work just as hard at bar pressing in order to give themselves injections of dopamine straight into the nucleus accumbens as they will to give themselves electrical stimulation. Thus, it seems that this whole circuit is dedicated to controlling pleasurable behaviour. It seems as if the dopamine injection or electrical stimulation is mimicking the effect of doing something really fantastic. However, recent experiments show that something more interesting is going on.

Taken from : “Happiness” The Science Behind Your Smile

Mac Games for Apple Computers

Download-mac-games.com offers you huge amount of Mac games you can download and play on your Apple computer. From the puzzle for all ages including Pre-K and up until the strategy and RPG games. You can also find clones of games for Galaga, Tetris and many more. By downloading apple games in this website, you can save your time from hunting the game you like in the stores or reduce the pile of CD’s and boxes because you just need to download it online.

This website allows you to download Mac games with easy process by clicking the particular game on the table list or search it by typing the keyword and download instantly after you find the right game. The games list are complete with the information of game play, file size and price. They are always up dated and improved everyday.

You can download the game and try to play it for free and purchase the full version with affordable price if you like it, most of the game featured in this website are downloadable, so tell your friends about this site and introduce them to the awesome Mac games that you can download with simple and easy process.