Neurochemistry of contentment
I've been contemplating the notion of beauty, pleasure, comfort, contentment, and joy as neurochemical processes lately. Are our intrinsic notions of beauty hard-wired? Are our intrinsic notions subject to evolution?
Why is a lake with mountains more beautiful than a pile of rocks in the dessert? Which scene invokes the neurochemical pathways of comfort and contentment? Which is more comforting to an armadillo?
Why does darkness create such a visceral fear in children? Presumably juvenile bats don't have such a fear.
Do salmon feel a sense of contentment, excitement, happiness when they're swimming up their native river? Is that sense of contentment triggered by sensing the chemical composition of the river?
Why does bacon taste so good? How far back in our ancestral evolutionary tree did we survive off of cooking pigs over fire? Perhaps it was simply our desire for bacon that gave us an evolutionary advantage over the Neanderthals?
Why is a lake with mountains more beautiful than a pile of rocks in the dessert? Which scene invokes the neurochemical pathways of comfort and contentment? Which is more comforting to an armadillo?
Why does darkness create such a visceral fear in children? Presumably juvenile bats don't have such a fear.
Do salmon feel a sense of contentment, excitement, happiness when they're swimming up their native river? Is that sense of contentment triggered by sensing the chemical composition of the river?
Why does bacon taste so good? How far back in our ancestral evolutionary tree did we survive off of cooking pigs over fire? Perhaps it was simply our desire for bacon that gave us an evolutionary advantage over the Neanderthals?
posted by IdeaMan at 11:59 AM
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