The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Meth Addiction Leads to Sexual Misery (CNN.com 12/3/2004) (link dead)
Doctors and government officials don't like to talk much about it, but there is an obvious reason people get hooked on methamphetamine: sex.
Meth eventually destroys the sex drive, but for a short while it can boost sexual appetite and performance more powerfully than drugs such as cocaine, doctors say.
I've explained how the entire brain is a self-organizing system of mathematics that involves seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Too much pleasure leads to pain. Too much excitation leads to inhibitionÉ throughout the nervous system. Sex is an activity that pulls together as much of this inclination of the nervous system into as many pathways as it can for the duration of the sex act. (Notice how the basic units of nerve processing - pleasure and pain - when taken to an extreme, are devoid of meaning or specific thought: you can't “think” when in the extremes of either pleasure or pain because meaning comes from complex combinations of pleasures and pains but there is no meaning but that of the basic unit when there are many cells synchronizing these experiences.)
Drugs are not representative of any natural processes in the brain and they create an atmosphere in the brain that is not natural and not responsive to the normal signals coming from the environment and the body. A drug that boosts sex drive to an extreme is getting that result in good part by inhibiting many subsets of the brain. Too much excitation at the synaptic level leads to inhibition. Sex is a revving up of the excitement level of cells synchronizing with each other, which is also helped by the shutdown of other subsets that might muddy this signaling (acceleration of excitation leads to successive shutdowns of subsets that might interfere with this signaling). If you try to enhance sex with drugs the excitation is increased which increases the amount of stress that leads to shutdowns and increases the number of subsets that are shutdown. Because excessive excitation keeps the cells firing longer with greater communications of this stress before the shutdown stops communicating these changes, the stress that comes from excessive excitation can be greater than that caused by artificial increases in inhibition from inhibitory drugs. (An example in another realm of processing would be the greater damage that can be felt from a dry-ice burn over a burn from flame.)
So artificially enhanced sex will collect a lot of stress and then change the ability to repeat the same effect with drugs or not. The cells reorganize to make sense of the new brain environment (with drugs) and therefore are impaired in repeating that event without the drugs.
This will happen with any drug that enhances sex to any extreme.
The inhibition of the brain caused by trying to enhance the sex with drugs will cause collections of stress in the parts of the brain with the most connectivity to the most parts of the body and connectivity to different realms of brain processing. Sex is an event of emotion and body and the parts of the brain that deal with that subject matter are the switchboard of the brain. So to increase the stress that involves sex will also affect reason (rational thinking) and affect the ability to bring divergent realms of thought together at the highest levels of processing. Problems here lead to obsessions (obsessive reasoning and obsessive movements such as rocking or shaking) and lead to problems in reason and perception and emotional interpretation of events so that these drug users will develop irrational emotional and logical problems (violent behavior and mood changes, hallucinations, irrational thought).
Dr. John Standridge, an addiction specialist with the Council for Alcohol and Drug Abuse Services in Chattanooga, said meth and other stimulants initially "rev up the dopamine nervous system in the brain. They rev it up and burn it out."
This is the kind of mistake always articulated in these studies that assume that some chemical marker is regulating some kind of activity. Dopamine happens to be a common chemical marker for receptors in the emotional/switchboard regions of the brain, but it is not the only one and many cells that are not dopaminergic are always involved in these sexual events. Just because there is more statistical observation of dopamine involvement does not mean that dopamine is the regulator of pleasure. Pleasure and pain are throughout the nervous system and manifest differently in different realms of processing (such as beauty and ugliness in visual processing, sweet and foul in the realm of taste, right and wrong in reason, and pleasure and pain in the realms of emotion where so many different subjects come together that the basic units become the most noticeable realms to be noticed again).
They always write that "brain chemistry" regulates whatever function because the intent of all of these studies is to come up with some kind of pharmaceutical that can be marketed and make money as almost every study is funded, in whole or in part, by some pharmaceutical company.
"Hair falls out. Teeth fall out," Walters said. "That's not sexy."
I mentioned above that emotion is the switchboard so that problems that occur with stress in the emotional centers of the brain will have a lot of connectivity to other realms and the realms that deal with non-language processing in the brain as well (regulating the functioning and movement of the body). Stress collected in emotion will be communicated strongly as stress in bodily function so that problems in digestion and health will come quickly with stress that is increased in emotion. You mess with the stress in the switchboard of the brain at great peril because it will increase all physical and mental disorders to much greater degree than stress that is pinpointed to a more isolated section of the brain with less connectivity to the rest of the brain. Drugs that enhance sex and emotion are having an effect on the regions of the brain that connect to all functions and perceptions. You mess with these kinds of drugs and you will lose function in your physical health, lose function in your basic senses of sight and sound and taste and touch, lose emotional function and lose your sanity. One of the first things to go will be control of focus (ADD) as that has something to do with fairly low levels of stress compared to more extreme problems later.
All impairment is caused by stress and it is just the where and how the stress is increased in the brain that results in the different disorders (or different manifestations of increased stress).
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