Evolution Beyond Hard Wired Subconsciousness

Autonomic Nervous System v/s Consciousness

Humans are hard-wired to take some actions through their Autonomic nervous system. Automated responses are out of direct conscious control like changes in the rate of digestion, breathing rate, and heartbeat rate. These are also known as somatic responses. An autonomic nervous system can be supposed to as analogous to a seesaw. The way a seesaw has two extremes, the autonomic nervous system also has two ends alertness and calmness. Alertness is the sympathetic nervous system whereas calmness is the parasympathetic nervous system. When a human is triggered by a stimulus (a stimulus resulting in stimulation of the autonomic nervous system) it results in the development of action through the hard-wired signals in the brain. The parts of the brain involved in performing these actions are the prefrontal cortex, insula, hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, and limbic system. In such cases, your insula and others serve as centres for memory and experience and send signals to the prefrontal cortex to provide alternates of behaving in that situation. At the same time, a parallel response also works as we take time to respond, the Vagus nerve sends signals to the heart to decrease the rate and trigger calmness. The prefrontal cortex lets you generate your alternate self in a given situation and allows you to change your hard-wired rules. This is a cognitive approach whereas, in patients with anxiety, this process happens upside down so the patient is not able to come up with alternate behavioural patterns and performs according to hard-wired brain mechanisms. Through one's consciousness, we enable ourselves to get out of the hard-wired mechanism and develop our alternate selves through our memory and experience. 

Difference between precision and consciousness.

You all have watched movies where villains have trained, expert soldiers who never miss a shot, do not care about the alternate self in a situation and are just hard-wired precise. This can be done, Shutting down the prefrontal cortex transiently leads to the development of precision and accuracy in humans and everything becomes a stimulus in such cases. So, if you train a human to perform into triggering stimulus and shut down their prefrontal cortex, they become inhumanly accurate or MACHINES.

What causes a miss? Your thinking ability to generate alternate sets of rules. For example, if you are gonna shoot someone and they start screaming, then you will start imagining your alternate self who does not want to shoot him. Shutting down the prefrontal cortex results in the loss of that ability. Humans are made not to be 100% accurate through their cognitive behaviour.

Breaking down into the mindset of powerful people like David Goggins.

Humans are meant to evolve beyond their subconsciousness or somatic responses. For example, when you try to do something by resisting and fighting your inner self (let's say waking up at 4 am in the morning), you have to fight and resist the part of your brain called the limbic system that tells you that you are tired. Going beyond your somatic responses by suppressing them lets you acknowledge how you'd benefit after completing your task or how terrible you'd feel if you won't. This is when you let yourself evolve beyond your automated responses to pursue your goals and take action. This is not directly an inhibitory response, it is your mechanism to generate an alternate self and replace your hard-wired subconsciousness with a new one through your experience and imagination.

Concept of fear, panic, emotions, and confrontation?

When you fear something, you have two ways to express your actions and they are basically referred to as Fight or Flight also referred to as Back up or Move forward. 

When you fear something there are three responses; 1. Pause or freeze which is the lowest anxiety response but we mostly confuse it with the highest autonomic arousal, 2. Retreat or back up which is the next level of anxiety response, 3. Leaning and confrontation which leads to the highest autonomic arousal or anxiety response.

Fear leads to activation of the brain areas and the confrontation of your fears allows you to go beyond them and results in the formation of new networks in the brain. Let's understand by an example. Let's say you have a fear of heights. So, exposure to that fear will lead to activation of those brain areas asking you to fight or flight. You then choose to fight through your cognitive behaviour (your cognitive mind telling you that nothing is as fearful as it seems in your mind) and dive into your fear. In fight response, you will end up having a new experience which eventually will prove the fact that nothing is as fearful as it seems in your mind. This new experience will lead to the release of dopamine as the brain parts involved in this response work closely with the dopaminergic parts of your brain. The prefrontal cortex is also a part of the dopaminergic reward system. When dopamine is released, it goes back to the parts of the brain involved in that response and enhances the connection between your brain in the same order they occurred to take that fight action. When you are exposed to the same kind of fear next time, your mind has an experience and it works along with the prefrontal cortex to come up with alternate selves that are capable beyond your past self.

This is the way you can go beyond your fears to form new connections in your brain and use your dopaminergic response to confront your fears rather than flight. Dopamine does not provide you satiation, it drives you forward through a reward system leading to positive responses. At higher levels, dopamine is not "having", it's "wanting". It is not "pleasure", it is "craving, motivation, and drive". The prefrontal cortex is also a part of the dopaminergic reward system. 

I can relate a lot to this, I have been a coward myself, fearing a lot of things, and avoiding doing them because I presume situations in my head about what is going to happen if I confront my fear. It has been my most significant trouble ever. Now, I still presume situations but I rather go and confront my fear. And trust me, you are luckier than you think you are, you can overcome your fear by confronting it, and the results become experience and memory for your brain. This is the evolution of your brain beyond your measured capability. 

How does dopamine work?

Let's understand by analogy. You want to eat ice cream, so you decided to get some ice cream, and go to the ice cream parlour, but it is closed. This is a Reward prediction error (RPE) and it generates negative dopaminergic feedback that drops the dopamine below the baseline. 

In another situation, you go out to buy ice cream, the parlour is open, and dopamine is released in response to rewarding stimuli. Understand this, ice cream is not the reward, reward was right before the first lick of the ice cream because you knew you were gonna get it. 

Dopamine is anticipation, it is hope, it is not having what you want, it is the anticipation of wanting what you want to have. Similarly in sex and similarly in other dopaminergic scenarios like exercise, sex, food, and..

Have you ever felt let down after receiving a reward? Maybe because the anticipation was too much. This happens after sex or after the delivery of a child because you have so much anticipation that when you actually receive the reward, it results in a decrement of dopamine transiently. 

Dopamine works on the principle that something good is going to happen. It drives you forward and motivates you to involve in behaviours that caused the release of it. If you can involve yourself in those motivational actions voluntarily, it can be the most positive form of positive reinforcement as dopamine backtracks the neural network that was involved in receiving the rewarding response and reinforces the neural connections so that it motivates you to seek out similar behaviour in future.

what happens to drug addicts?

Drug reinforces the state of mind that caused you to take the drug. Let's say you were in a state of complete nihilistic hopelessness, so the drug will reinforce the memory of events and the state of mind that preceded it before taking the drug.

Disappointment and Dopamine.

Disappointment leads to RPE i.e. dropping down of dopamine below the baseline and disappointment is basically your punishment to yourself as it usually is a consequence of anticipatory behaviour. You should not be highly anticipatory. Let's say I anticipate something good is going to happen but it doesn't manifest itself as per your anticipation or you make a mistake, then you are gonna get an emotional hit in the form of pain as a consequence of your anticipatory behaviour and that pain is the beginning of the death of the system that mediated this response, thus is the death of certain neural network connections. You should eradicate the system that makes you anticipate and is a malfunction, but as those systems die, they resist and fight for themselves resulting in pain as the consequence. This is all a Biological process.

Let's take an analogy, when you are a newcomer to anything, you are over-optimistic about yourself because you anticipate a lot of your future self. Over time, as you become familiar that your anticipation doesn't manifest itself, you become realistic. But at first, you didn't understand the opinions of others senior to you because of your optimistic anticipation. What happens over time is that as you become aware that your anticipation is not manifesting itself and life is not "Student of the year", the death of the system that mediates this anticipation response occurs resulting in pain. 

What is a depressive Cascade?

You anticipate something good is going to happen,

and let's say you make a mistake,

So the question that arises is, How significant is the mistake?

And the answer to that totally depends on how you view things.

It might be, "that mistake could be done by anybody"

or, "How and why did I make this mistake? I should have been more responsible. There is something wrong with me a person."

And a depressed mindset would go even further, "There is not only something wrong with me and this decision but there is something wrong with every decision I make these days. I never make good decisions, I have never made a good decision in the past, and there is no way I can change that in future too.

What this does to you is that it takes out all your abilities to generate your future self and find yourself in a depressive pit.

What can be done to break the depressive cascade?

"Innocent until proven guilty"

What made those thoughts come up, as they are accusatory and a part of possibilities occurring due to failed anticipation. In a situation like this, what you can think of is "what is the minimal thing you did incorrectly and how to alter it so that similar things do not happen in future". It is also a habit of mind to think that " what is the minimum amount of crime that I am responsible for at this moment".

Depressed people are not resilient to cascading effects of self-punishment. Let's say that you are as bad as you think you are but on the contrary, maybe not, let's make you as innocent as you can be for a contradictory argument. So, what is the minimal behavioural transformation that you need to make to ensure that similar mistakes are not replicated in the future? It doesn't take too much often, it just requires fixing some shingles. 

The concept behind mind training and meditation camps

How do you tell yourself a story (a real story) that is most likely to put you in a position where you can confidently approach the thing that is blocking your path. 

Maniacs: People who celebrate too much

Don't celebrate too much as it makes you become highly anticipatory. The celebration should be targeted, not indiscriminate. There are problems with positive dopaminergic emotions that you can not be positive about everything, it has to be targeted not indiscriminate. Do not reward yourself for every possible outcome For maniacs, every possible self is wonderful so every possibility gives them a dopaminergic hit reinforcing the Positive emotion catastrophe. Maniacs are enjoyable and enthusiastic because their every possible self results in dopaminergic-mediated positive emotion.