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Happy Birthday Sesame Street
RIP Mr. Hooper
R. Crumb Keeps on Truckin’ at Royce Hall 10/29/09 - LAist
R Crumb riot!
“Audrey’s A Looker”
She certainly is. And she’s just around the corner.
A Molecule of Motivation, Dopamine Excels at Its Task (New York Times) -
welbutrin xl ftw
People talk of getting their “dopamine rush” from chocolate, music, the stock market, the BlackBerry buzz on the thigh — anything that imparts a small, pleasurable thrill. Familiar agents of vice like cocaine, methamphetamine, alcohol and nicotine are known to stimulate the brain’s dopamine circuits, as do increasingly popular stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin.
In the communal imagination, dopamine is about rewards, and feeling good, and wanting to feel good again, and if you don’t watch out, you’ll be hooked, a slave to the pleasure lines cruising through your brain. Hey, why do you think they call it dopamine?
Yet as new research on dopamine-deficient mice and other studies reveal, the image of dopamine as our little Bacchus in the brain is misleading, just as was the previous caricature of serotonin as a neural happy face.
In the emerging view, discussed in part at the Society for Neuroscience meeting last week in Chicago, dopamine is less about pleasure and reward than about drive and motivation, about figuring out what you have to do to survive and then doing it. “When you can’t breathe, and you’re gasping for air, would you call that pleasurable?” said Nora D. Volkow, a dopamine researcher and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Or when you’re so hungry that you eat something disgusting, is that pleasurable?”
In both responses, Dr. Volkow said, the gasping for oxygen and the wolfing down of something you would ordinarily spurn, the dopamine pathways of the brain are at full throttle. “The whole brain is of one mindset,” she said. “The intense drive to get you out of a state of deprivation and keep you alive.”
i agree, my dear.
Ahh!!! Awesome!!!! That’s it, I gotta make this happen.
Phil Spector: Back to Mono (1958-1969)
The first video game I can remember playing, ever. Been looking for more info on it forever.
“The main aim of Donald Duck’s Playground is to build a playground for Donald’s nephews by working shifts and buying playground equipment using the dough you earn, then go build it in the park.”
Capitalism and construction!
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“Brian Wilson has said that this album profoundly affected him at the time of its release, briefly keeping him from sliding further into depression and mental illness.”