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by svnt
1536 days ago
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Here is how I think about it: your cognitive processes are accustomed to certain biochemical biases. You’ve grown and developed your brain in response to stimuli under a certain set of conditions. One set might be jacked adrenals due to your propensity for epic soundtracks and caffeine or chocolate consumption. Another set might be alcohol and social feedback. If you spend a lot of time in these states, your unbiased function diminishes because you are optimizing for a different chemical bias. If you are not so far gone, or are exceptionally motivated or introspective, you can integrate those experiences, and it might expand your awareness. If you can’t, or don’t, it might increase your function while using but reduce your sober function. This effect will increase as you spend more and more time ‘high’: you are transitioning function within your own constrained cognitive capacity to a different bias. |
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That range of regulation is what we drift towards when we start adapting to an exogenous compound (some drug) that is consistently present through repeated dosing.
Considering that information, we do adapt to become "normal functioning" (according to the previously mentioned genetics) and it becomes more difficult again when we suddenly remove the drug (again forcing us out of that range that our genetic regulatory mechanisms would like us in)
During periods that we are using the exogenous compound we can form new habits driven by changes made by the drug which can stick around after removal, as removal of the drug won't suddenly undo many of the synaptic changes that occurred. I think this is what we can call the integration of experiences and I think that long term potentiation is a big factor in those changes (which is a pretty neat topic on its own, I'd recommend reading about LTP if you want to understand some of the mechanisms of learning)