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Once through the door, psychoactive drugs bring about different activities in the brain, usually by enhancing or oppressing the original activity of the specific faculty they affect.
Nicotine does the trick primarily in a part of our brain known as the cholinergic system.
When nicotine binds to the neurons it causes a chain reaction in the brain. It facilitates the release of a number of other neurotransmitters, including dopamine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, serotonin, glutamate and beta-endorphin.
These neurotransmitters are responsible for a vast range of activities. Dopamine, serotonin and beta-endorphin, for example, are elements of the body's reward mechanism. They can also be described as 'feel good' substances.
This is a key issue, and it needs to be well understood. Once you understand this, the following will make sense.
We all want to feel good.
Smoking rewards us because it promotes the excretion of 'feel good' substances in our brain. Smoking therefore gives us pleasure.
Pleasure is what we want in life.
There's only one thing we actually want more than pleasure …
… and this is to avoid pain.
The master life purpose …
gain pleasure and avoid pain.
That's how we operate, consciously or unconsciously.
If you understand this, you understand the most valuable explanation of human (and most other species) behavior. |
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What we want in life is
To Gain Pleasure
What we want even more in life is
To Avoid Pain
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Each individual has different preferences as to what pleasures are to be gained and what pains are to be avoided, and each culture cultivates certain pleasures to be pursued and pains to be avoided. For example - for a Scandinavian, biting on a chili pepper is pain, for a Thai it is pleasure. However, it is a universal truth that everyone, wherever they may come from, avoids pain and seeks pleasure.
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