american mind so rob why don't you start
by telling us
what the book is about in a way that
folks without a medical degree
would understand actually i wrote this
book because we've
suffered a crisis in our culture and i
believe
it comes down to a
mistake that we've made between
the interpretation of two of our most
important and positive emotions pleasure
and happiness
a lot of people equate the two but i'm
here to tell you that they are
completely different a lot of people
think that it's exactly the same in fact
on the internet you can find definitions
that actually
conflate and confuse the two so what are
the differences between pleasure and
happiness and i believe there are seven
pleasure is short-lived happiness is
long-lived
pleasure is visceral happiness is
real pleasure is taking happiness is
giving pleasure can be achieved with
substances
happiness cannot be achieved with
substances
pleasure is experienced alone happiness
is experienced in social
groups the extremes of pleasure
all lead to addiction whether they be
substances or behaviors
yet there's no such thing as being
addicted to too much happiness
and finally number seven most important
pleasure is
dopamine and happiness is serotonin now
these are
two biochemicals these are two
neurotransmitters these are two
chemicals that the brain makes and
uses to communicate between one neuron
brain cell
and another now why do we care
so what well turns out dopamine
excites the next neuron and neurons when
they're excited
too much too frequently tend to die
so the neuron has a defense mechanism
against that
what it does is it reduces the number of
receptors that are available
to be stimulated in an attempt to try to
mitigate the damage when you say to be
stimulated you mean to be excited
to be excited that's right and so we
have a name for that
process it's called down regulation and
a lot of
different chemicals in the body do that
now
you get a hit you get a rush
the receptors go down next time you need
a bigger hit
to get the same rush because there are
fewer receptors to occupy
and you need a bigger hit and a bigger
hit and a bigger hit until finally
taking a huge hit
to get nothing that's called tolerance
and then when the neurons start to die
that's called addiction
serotonin however is inhibitory
it's not excitatory it inhibits its
receptor
to provide contentment to zen out if you
will
so you can't overdose the serotonin
neuron
and what does it mean to inhibit a
receptor what it means is it binds
but it doesn't activate the process
beyond the receptor so what it does is
it basically
slows down those neurons instead of
causing them to fire up
and so by doing and in doing so you end
up with the process of contentment
that feeling of one with the world if
you will
that thing we call happiness now
there's one thing that down regulates
serotonin dopamine so the more pleasure
you seek
the more unhappy you get and
las vegas madison avenue wall street
silicon valley
and washington dc have very specifically
and in a coordinated fashion confused
and conflated
the term happiness with the term
pleasure so that you can
buy happiness so that
they can sell you their junk
it's called the american economy and
it's based on hedonic substances
substances that drive pleasure
rather than happiness and in the process
we have become most decidedly
unhappy and the problem is you can't fix
a problem
unless you identify what the problem is
that's the reason for this book