Positive and Negative Emotions

You ignore almost everything except things that move you forward and things that act as obstacles. Your dopaminergic system alerts you to situations that help you move forward. The negative emotions are generated (either through a small detour or catastrophic end).

Positive events have short-term and long-term benefits. Passing an exam allows positive emotions to echo across multiple levels of analysis. It makes you feel good about yourself, your goals, and life.

Negative events have short term and long-term repercussions. A sheltered, naïve person who encounters malevolence will very likely descend into complete chaos that they might not recover from. They will sink into depression and anxiety. On a neurological level, their hippocampus shrinks, and amygdala grows.

When goals are blocked – it leads you to question everything about your belief system. You cease to know where you are, and when you don’t know where you are – everything suddenly becomes relevant. Your brain deteriorates from too much stress.

The question becomes: How big is the obstacle? And you assess the size of the threat the same way your ancestors assessed the size of their predators. It works the same way. It couldn’t be any different. Evolution is a conservative system and so your threat response builds upon the previous systems.

Information

We conceptualize predators as “the unknown”, but we have come to learn that it could be beneficial to confront the unknown. The predators were threats, but they then became food. That defines the archetypical story of mankind. We go out into the terrifying unknown as information foragers and gather things of value. The system could have also developed from our fruit eating activities that required us to identify ripe fruit. In a sense, there isn’t much of a difference between information and food. We are always looking for ways to produce more of what we need.

Anomalous information usually has two sides. If you were in a bad relationship, a fight can represent a chance for reconciliation and resolution, or it might signify the end of the relationship (which you don’t want). Both the reward (goal-seeking) and threat (predatory) systems are activated. A good rule of thumb is to assume that the fight is a short-term problem that can be resolved, until there is good reason to assume that it is a long-term problem – in which case, it would be advisable to end the relationship.

There are few limits to your ability to turn pain into pleasure. For example, you train yourselves to enjoy coffee and olives – which are originally bitter. But with enough practice, we can learn to enjoy them.

Depression

When happens to depressed people is that they misinterpret their mistakes. If you had to prepare a meal, for example, your first step is to set the table.

What depressed people do after making a mistake, for example, setting the table badly is misinterpret that to mean that they cannot cook a meal. That leads them to believe that they can’t take care of their family, and finally that they are failures. Their serotonin levels fall, and it makes every little thing seem like a catastrophe. They don’t have proper mechanisms for dealing with failures. They radically overestimate the competence of everyone else and underestimate their own competence.