Chapter 14: How Dopamine Games Keep Neuroscientists From Learning About Neurocentrism

by Charles Lyell on November 1, 2017

The Leading Cause of Self-deception

“We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.” – Richard Leakey

As previously mentioned, dopamine games aren’t “mind games,” they’re “mindless games” that provide and protect self-deceptions, delusions, and convenient ingnorance.

In other words, dopamine games are popular with DIMwits who don’t want to know they’re fooling themselves. Unfortunately, they’re so effective they help neuroscientists avoid learning how dopamine keeps them from grasping how dopamine works.

Attempts to raise dopamine awareness taught me how DIMwits instinctively initiate dopamine games the instant the topic turns to dopamine manipulating behavior. The difference is clever DIMwits are more likely to employ ingenious tactics while witless counterparts resort to desperate, blatant, and transparent ploys.

Brilliant or dull, addicts abhor discussing threats that get in the way of feeding dopamine-induced cravings. It doesn’t matter if the cravings demand dopamine-triggering drugs, food, sex, gambling, money, religion, safety/power, acceptance/peer approval/attention, or esteem/status.

Popular dopamine games include…

Look How Much I Already Know About Dopamine

LHMIAKAD is an especially interesting game because players use a lower cognitive ability (parroting information they don’t actually understand) to avoid learning what they don’t want to know (i.e. why, how, and that dopamine is doing their thinking for them). As a bonus, LHMIAKAD players score easy dopamine hits by swallowing the esteem elevating delusion about being open minded and interested in understanding how dopamine works.

Variations of LHMIAKAD include: I’ve Heard It All Before, I’m Much Smarter Than You, and You Can’t Teach Me Anything.

That’s Interesting!

That’s Interesting! is even more interesting than LHMIAKAD because it provides artful players with a strategy to avoid learning by feigning curiosity as a convenient ruse before segueing to a less threatening topic. In effect, TI! is a cheap but effect trick that protects players’ safety, esteem, and dopamine flow while artificially elevating esteem and triggering the brain chemical.

If research linked irrational behaviors to a debilitating disease, DIMwits would be frantically learning about the symptoms. Yet when it comes to understanding how a common brain disease (i.e. dopamine-induced madness) is responsible for every man-made crisis, it only takes two words, “That’s Interesting!” to avoid the topic.

I’m Tired of Hearing About Dopamine!

ITHAD! is more popular than LHMIAKAD because it doesn’t require any knowledge of the process that keeps DIMwits playing dopamine games. The payoff for ITHAD! players is they get to ignore their suspicious disinterest about a brain chemical doing their thinking and, in many cases, ruining their lives.

Players who add a touch of the dopamine game Arrogance score easy dopamine hits triggered by the esteem elevating deception that being annoyed (i.e. momentarily dopamine deprived) is more important than learning about a debilitating brain chemical responsible for their ignorance and arrogance.

As with most defensive dopamine games, the purpose of ITHAD! is to block further discussions by setting up the implied threat of advancing to a more offensive dopamine game, How Dare You Insult Me!

How Dare You Insult Me!

HDYIM! is an all-out “change the focus” game played by desperate DIMwits unable to defend their deceptions. The goal is to create a diversion (i.e. how offended the HDYIM! player is) to make the threatening information seem somehow irrelevant.

Nitpicking

Nitpicking is an extremely popular dopamine game that helps players bypass threatening information with generalizations, rationalizations, questions, and/or incessant quibbling over details. Nitpickers can be extremely resourceful when it comes to coming up with irrelevancies to avoid learning about dopamine.

Variations of Nitpicking include: I Don’t Believe What You’re Saying Because I Don’t Like the Way You Said It and This Is Too Simplistic.

This Is Too Complicated

This Is Too Complicated is a simplistic “dismissive” dopamine game favored by intellectually challenged DIMwits who dislike learning (especially about dopamine) because they consider thinking unnecessary, unpleasant, and painful.

TITC protects esteem and guards against additional dopamine deprivation by helping players pretend the problem doesn’t involve cerebral limitations. By dismissing what they can’t (or don’t want to) understand they get to delude themselves into believing the fault lies with the information’s unnecessary complexity.

Variations of TITC include: This Is Too Depressing, That’s Ridiculous!, The Information Isn’t Convincing, You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About, and BORING!

Why Does It Matter?

WDIM? is a classic dopamine game played by DIMwits who’ve stumbled onto a strategy that rewards arrogant ignorance with gratuitous dopamine hits. Ironically, the same WDIM! players, who would never ask, for example, “Why does it matter if tests show I have a brain tumor destroying my life?” have no qualms about asking, in effect, “Why does it matter if a brain chemical is keeping me from wanting to know I’m suffering from a brain disease?”

Like all game players WDIM! aficionados can’t help themselves. Faced with dopamine and esteem threatening information, their only choice is to grasp for an unquestioned question that offers an undeserved, delusional, esteem-elevating, dopamine-triggering “I won that one!”

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