r/existentialneurobiolo

If sensations are the root of our experience, how and where do they become feelings?

Or, what is the missing, mysterious ingredient that turns raw phenomenological data into these vehicles of affect?

As someone who identifies as alexithymic these questions are critical to the resolution of this, my self diagnostic.

It’s not that I don’t have feelings, in an essential sense. There is something beyond pure sensation, that falls short of mere thought.

But what is this, mostly negatively biased, affective state?

In essence, our feelings come from a neurobiological need to distinguish threats from treats.

That is, in the wild, our ancestors had better prioritise sabre tooth tigers from tasty treats.

Otherwise, our species would have, long ago, gone the way of the dodo.

But, here we are, saddled with a negativity bias that make evolutionary sense.

But, what of the positive affects, the positive feelings that, supposedly, make life worth living? Beyond mere survival?

If we don’t survive, we can’t thrive. So, maybe it’s just a question of priority?

Having survived, we prioritise things that feel better, rather than worse. Sweet rather than sour.

So, where is that discernment in me? Where is the pleasure principle? Beyond the mere, but defining, struggle for survival.

The icing on the cake. The cherry on the sundae.

Where is that desire, rooted in somatic senses?

Wishing, wanting and enjoying the fruits of life, both literally and metaphorically.

The answer? I have none, it seems. That instinctual secret sauce is missing.

And so, I posit and seek epistemic certainty, rather than march along the hedonic treadmill.

Lucky to be in conscious control, but forever envying those that are driven by instinct, rather than left to consciously create their reality.

How sweet it must be to be pushed into life, the living stream, rather than to have to be pulled into it, by self conceived Tension Resolution Systems.

The responsibility of conscious living, perhaps, is the future of our species, if we have one?

#existentialneurobiology

‘All the worlds a stage and each man must play his part’.

Are you, you?

Or are you a facsimile, another copied page?

That conclusion seems offensive, right?

No one wants or likes to be called a copy.

And yet, isn’t the essence of neuro typicality?

Life, capitalism for most of us, needs compliant serfs,

Not sovereigns, kings of our own Being.

Sure, we each have our individual flourishes

But we march to the beat of a society

That has largely lost its way

That doesn’t serve us.

That we serve tirelessly, fruitlessly.

And then, of course, are those who stray from main stream.

They are not typical and cannot readily submit to the yoke set for them.

But still, they need to perform too.

There is no other game in town.

Belonging, is a neurobiological tendency that is baked into the cake.

So, they mask.

Are you just performing?

Or, are you masking too?

What is the difference?

The performers sublimate their roles, the norms and can function without too much ado.

The maskers are further away from the centre and cannot submit to the loss of their selves, so readily.

The performers subsume the requirements of their servitude, it becomes subconscious, or at least out of sight.

The maskers, in part imbibe and are transformed by the cultural opiate.

But, they are still aware of a gap that, somehow, must be bridged.

They must force a mask to their faces.

And hold it there.

So, performance is endemic, the dis-ease, more or less, is not.

The medicalisation of neuro divergence provides a culturally acceptable, if not priceless, way to see the performance, the mask.

And, those with masks, incongruent and disfiguring as they may feel the mask to be, would rather be a performer than a masker.

Until, the cost, the pain of holding that mask to their faces becomes too hard to bear.

Like a strongly bound sticking plaster, they long to tear it off, to be real to themselves.

At least now, through diagnoses, these atypical people have mini communities to join with, to belong to.

I am a masker or at least should be.

That is, the self I am, that I appear to be, is not acceptable.

Not acceptable to a soul that still longs and needs to be normal to belong.

I don’t need the diagnostic label, but feel the incongruity acutely.

I am still unique, particular.

A misfit.

What is my purpose?

What is my neurobiology pining for?

The cultural opiate is to no avail.

The diagnostic refuge likewise.

I am still a party of one.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.

Still, not belonging anywhere.