Falling in love. Getting awed by someone’s charm. On days like sparkling pink sapphires, gazing into the skies. Unquiet restlessnesses of the quiet amber afternoons. Dragonfly-sized microbots flying in the space. The crispness of breeze. The warmth of salty tears….
Life is a chocolate-box but the one full of fascination. There is tragedy but there is also comedy. The beauty is all around. Yet what makes this beauty so beautiful is something that resides already within the gleaming monument of our body with the crowning jewel of the brain glowing inside it.
According to the primordial soup theory, this body-brain combo is a chemical soup. Billions of years ago, life arose from the primordial soup of chemicals. Amino acids linked together to form proteins and as a result, this sophisticatedly-designed human body came into evolution.
Inside this chemical soup, electricity flurries in glittering pockets of dopamine molecules. This dopamine is responsible for all the things that feel to us like pink candy, sugarboo and honeypie.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter molecule that plays several important roles in the cells; it is a feel-good pleasure hormone, a chemical that gives you a good feeling. It is also responsible for the 4 Ms – memory, mood, motivation and movement.
As dopamine rises and falls, our mood and the mind also swings at the rhythm of highs and lows. Low dopamine levels are associated with brain fog, mood swings, and muscle spasms. Whereas, each time we feel anxious, insomniac, excess energy or hallucinatory, we have high dopamine levels. When dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act. When it falls, you feel less inspired.
Ever wondered, why after drinking coffee, your mind gets flooded with ideas? Well, its because dopamine is the key to the locks in the neurons. It is a neurotransmitter that transmits the information from neuron to neuron causing the stream of information to flow free.
But it is not only the coffee that makes us feel dopamine high. Dopamine is also one of the four happiness chemicals among oxytocin, endorphin and serotonin. When we feel happy or pleasant, or when we like something a lot, it releases a lot of dopamine in our bloodstream adding to the good-feeling we are feeling. Neurons release dopamine and make us feel highly motivated and excited. When we read a good story, listen to a song, make art, write poetry or watch an emotional movie, it also releases dopamine inside our body, making us feel pleasure.
Brain, the crown jewel of human body, sitting in its bony shell and dipped in a protective fluid is the labyrinth where these dopamine molecules are released and make us feel good. And so, dopamine is a chemical that is highly responsible for altering our brain chemistry.
Inside the mystery box of the brain, there are thoughts swirling every moment. Believe it or not but science has proven that each thought releases a certain chemical. While some thoughts release the happiness chemical dopamine, some others release the stressful or destructive chemicals.
The moment a chemical is released, there are neuropeptides in the brain that experience neural differentiation. How this differentiation happens? Well, each of our cells has receptors attached to it. Each receptor is sensitive to a certain kind of a protein called peptide. There are receptors for negative or angry peptides and there are receptors for positive or loving peptides. The moment a thought pops up, a chemical is released, and the receptors receive this chemical. Now, when these cells multiply, they multiply according to the type of receptor that has been activated in them. If negative peptides have been activated, more negative receptor cells will be produced, and the same with the positive receptor cells.
Thoughts are nothing but electrochemical reactions that occur in the billions of nerve cells called neurons and trillions of connections called synapses.
Our brain is like a billion-edged tesseract, a tesseract within tesseracts, too complex, that enables us to look at a leaf, tree, grass, flower, sky and ocean, all of it at once.
Every thought triggers a neurochemical change in the brain. Thoughts program the cells and the way our cells our programmed, it determines our overall chemistry and how we actually feel.
Therefore, activities such as meditation, reading books, good music and stories program the brain chemistry by releasing either dopamine or its opposite chemical cortisol. We either feel happy or we feel worried.
The point of all this science is that the beauty you see in the world is all inside you. When you fall in love or experience a heartbreak or feel attached to someone or something or you find something beautiful, its actually the chemical soup stirring in a certain way inside you. If you change the way this soup is stirred, you can change the way how these chemicals make you feel. Thoughts control this chemical soup. Change the thoughts, change the chemistry.
So, fall in love, explore the beauty of life, engage in contemplation, observe your thoughts, inspire yourself.
Be the wild
dope soul that you already are!
Comments
Post a Comment