We form minima within our brain which we process one at a time and then we connect them together to produce the final thought.
Phasic dopamine is the force that creates the minima and tonic dopmaine is the one that connects them.
Most people have low phasic dopamine and high tonic which means that they have say 100x small minima fizzling away and these minima get connected rapidly because the tide of tonic dopamine flows over them easily. The network is established and reestablished very rapidly which is why they can process things like faces easily, and why they seem to be top-down thinkers.
People with dopamine dysregulation have high phasic dopamine and lower tonic, which means that they form smaller numbers of deep minima which then struggle to connect into a single network.
What this means is they may micro-focus on eyes and miss the rest of the face, or they may get very obsessed with one part of a problem and be unable to see the big picture. They become very, very good at the minima that carve the phasic troughs, but then they cannot connect the dots which leaves them scatterbrained and in physical pain.
This is why autistic people can seem like bottoms-up thinkers: we need to export the results from one minima at a time and then build the picture in external memory before it will be complete: we do not have the tonic dopamine to connect the minima in our brains.
So for example I would always make art pieces not knowing what they’d look like at the end (this enlightenment thing seems to be one of them haha). I would put piece after piece seemingly randomly, even to myself, and then right at the end they would coalesce into something that surprised even me.
Software devs - tell me this isn’t you. Right? Yeah you know what I mean.
So the reason that we think like this is the phasic dopamine which just gouges shit into our brains deep. We get stuck in these minima and they manifest as looped thoughts which we can neither complete nor export.
What we don’t realise is that all of these minima are actually parts of the same problem. We don’t realise this *until we export them* and then we look at them and go ‘ooooh so that’s what it was’.
So.
Minima. Sand tunnels.
Dig the tunnels with phasic dopamine, one at a time.
The tide of tonic dopamine comes in and links them all up.
This is how we think.
For most people the tunnels are shallow because the tonic tide comes in regularly and washes them away. mini-eureka: they read a facial expression.
For us, the tunnels are fuuuuucking deep because the bastard tide never comes in. So we carry on digging and we get obsessive and we fucking master shit, yeah, yeah?
And then every once in a while the FUCKING TIDE WILL COME IN and you have the theory of relativity or some cunt sat in his fucking house in hokkaido doing hot baths and humming and fucking realising how human fucking beings THINK!!!
MOTHERFUCKERRRR!!!!
Anyway. That’s how we do it, bitches.
Peace.
Love you all.
Ps. this is also how we cure trauma and become enlightened yo. Explosive eureka-like enlightenments and trauma fixes are also only available to us because of our fucking shitty tides and great shovels.
Bring it.
I’m gonna go get an ice cream.
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