Hello,
My name is Charles Lyell and I’m seeking a visionary with a burning desire to save our species from self-annihilation, the courage to understand neurocentrism, and one billion dollars.
The entire billion will be invested in advancing a universal understanding of neurocentrism and, in the process, expose, challenge, and replace the paradigm responsible for all man-made destruction, disasters, and dishonesty.
My services are included at no charge.
What’s in it for you?
In exchange for championing a breakthrough more earth shattering than heliocentrism, you’ll achieve what most overachievers crave. Immortality.
Imagine having your name up there with Archimedes, Pythagoras, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein, Copernicus, and Galileo. How would you feel knowing you’ll be remembered long after Jobs, Bezos, Musk, and both Buffets are all but forgotten?
You’ll be this century’s Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei
More than 1,700 years before Galileo adopted Copernicus’ theory, Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos proposed the first known heliocentric model. Additionally, the courageous Italian didn’t invent the telescope he used to validate Copernicus and Aristarchus. Centuries later, the individual who stuck his neck out is more renowned than three Dutchmen, who claimed credit for the first telescope, and two geniuses whose insights made Galileo a household name.
If you have the guts and the dough, here’s a chance to stage an historical coup by distinguishing your DNA from hundreds of befuddled billionaires and millions of middling millionaires.
Allow me to tell you about neurocentrism
Neurocentrism is a behavioral model linking all beliefs, choices, likes, and dislikes to maintaining the flow of neurotransmitters manufactured in primitive brains. The chemicals include oxytocin, serotonin, epinephrine, and dopamine. To streamline explanations neurocentrism focuses on dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for every acknowledged addiction to substances and behaviors, such as drugs, foods, and gambling.
Neurocentrism explains why bigotry, hatred, greed, lying, cheating, stealing, polluting, colluding, and warring are symptoms of unacknowledged dopamine-induced addictions plaguing our species for so long they aren’t considered addictions.
A short list of unacknowledged addictions includes dependencies to money, belief systems, and the psychological deficiency needs (d-needs) identified by Abraham Maslow for safety/power, acceptance/approval/attention, and esteem/status.
Why neurocentrism isn’t common knowledge
As heliocentrism demonstrated, it takes tremendous courage (as opposed to intelligence) to even consider obvious ideas and concepts until enough early adopters muster the gumption required to open closed eyes. How else do you explain the difference between eons of great thinkers who wouldn’t or couldn’t fathom the obvious and 17th century children, capable of wrapping their little heads around a straightforward astronomical model?
The unconscious drive to maintain dopamine flow makes it impossible, for geniuses and dolts alike, to accept information that threatens dopamine flow. Understanding how neurotransmitters influence/determine behavior and admitting to ignorance, mistakes, or being wrong pose major threats to dopamine flow because they threaten safety, power, acceptance, approval, and status. To complicate matters, the mindless obsession with dopamine maintenance (by seeking acceptance and avoiding rejection) is responsible for rampant homophily.
From The Backfire Effect and How to Change Minds by Christopher Graves
Compounding this inability for humans to easily consider evidence they might be wrong is a principle known as “homophily.” It is often defined as “birds of a feather flock together.” Homophily is a profound and primal force in humans that binds people together in clans, tribes or groups. But it also signals to tribes who is not an insider. Those who send cues they are from an out-group are exiled and nothing they say will be accepted at face value. The brain reinforces this evolutionary pull by rewarding those accepted into a group with a bit of oxytocin, also known as the “trust hormone” first encountered in life when newborns breast feed. The belongingness urge is so powerful among humans that the threat of being ejected from a group brings on a sharp activation of the anterior cingulate cortex—the region in the brain that governs physical as well as social exclusionary pain.
Dopamine-induced ignorance
Homophily is highly dependent on dopamine-induced ignorance, a key symptom, requirement, facilitator, and epiphenomenon of acknowledged and unacknowledged addictions. Neurological ignorance makes it possible to deny addictions by ignoring glaring symptoms that would otherwise expose addictions. Symptoms include self-deception, denial, an inability to admit to addictive behaviors, an intransigent commitment to continue indulging dopamine-triggering behaviors, a disregard for the personal, societal, and environmental damage the addictions cause, plus a preference for like mindless groups that share a disdain for information and individuals capable of exposing members’ addictions.
It doesn’t matter if the addictions are to drugs, gambling, money, belief systems, or Maslow’s deficiency needs.
Ignorance isn’t bliss but it does protect dopamine flow
Addicts depend on ignorance to maintain dopamine flow. The greater the threat the greater the ignorance, which is why nothing is too absurd, inane, or insane to ignore. Likewise, the more powerful the dopamine squirts triggered by safety, acceptance, approval, and esteem inflating deceptions, the more conveniently ignorant to the ignorance required to accept, believe, and defend patently false information.
When dopamine-induced ignorance is challenged, addicts maintain dopamine flow by playing dopamine games. Game strategies include lying, denying, dismissing, mocking, avoiding, ignoring, misinterpreting, getting insulted, offended, offensive, defensive, argumentative, belligerent, vindictive, retaliatory, and/or homicidal while (unconsciously) ignoring the dishonesty.
Why this might sound simplistic
The quagmire threatening our species’ survival started with simple-minded ancestors who couldn’t understand they were feeding, cultivating, indulging, encouraging, ignoring, and bequeathing destructive addictions. The more sapient progenitors grew, the more powerful the addictions, the more clever the deceptions, rationalizations, justifications, and denials required to remain oblivious to the obvious.
We’re all born and indoctrinated into highly addictive societies where addicts’ aversions to admitting to addictions are protected by homophily and bolstered by a congenital ignorance that prevents group members from risking rejection for noticing, discussing, questioning, investigating, and exposing their group’s dishonesty, secrets, foibles, and addictions.
Heliocentrism, neurocentrism, and dopamine flow
Heliocentrism took centuries to flip from easily ignored to too absurd to consider to too obvious to deny because it threatened everyone’s dopamine flow by righting an upside-down reality while offending powerful dupes who were less interested in admitting to being duped than junkies are to getting busted.
Though hard to imagine, the distinction between the earth orbiting a sun versus vice versa was initially so abstract, the masses’ dopamine flow was flummoxed by an embarrassing inability to comprehend the possibility a difference existed. As always, safety addicts are terrified of unknowns, acceptance addicts rattled by rejections, and status addicts discombobulated by expectations of humiliations. Then there were the dopamine-repellent implications of being kicked out of the center of the Universe.
Galileo’s more intelligent foes didn’t give a damn about science, scriptures, heresy, or hell. They were power brokers colluding against one man armed with an instrument that gave him the power to prove them wrong. Something had to be done to silence a confident big mouth whose refusal to be ignored threatened jobs, power, approval, status, and dopamine flow.
It doesn’t matter that neurocentrism is as obvious and impossible to disprove as heliocentrism once was. Until a modern day Galileo comes along, neurocentrism will remain every bit as abstract, impossible to grasp (for all but a few), easy to ignore, and easier to dismiss. Especially since neurocentrism threatens just about everyone’s dopamine flow because it turns a dishonest world outside in by exposing the root cause of rampant depravity – unacknowledged addictions. Which explains why anyone relying on self-deception to maintain dopamine flow is adverse to learning about neurocentrism. That equates to almost everyone.
Power and status addicts, accustomed to getting away with indulging and denying unacknowledged addictive behaviors, don’t want to know how scrambling for degrees, positions, credentials, money, possessions, acceptance, approval, and status symbols out there is actually about scoring the same neurotransmitter drug addicts trigger inside their heads with heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine.
I’m not being clever, hypothetical, metaphysical, metaphorical
As sure as the earth orbits the sun, dopamine keeps junkies injecting, gamblers losing, artists creating, whiners complaining, miscreants destroying, drinkers imbibing, rivals competing, climbers scaling, posers flaunting, followers flocking, polluters fouling, losers cheating, swindlers scamming, consumers shopping, and just about everyone conveniently ignoring the insanity of destroying our species’ future to score dopamine squirts in primitive brains.
The question isn’t if neurocentrism will be as widely accepted as heliocentrism, it’s when. And when it is the ramifications will be profound.
If you love challenges, you’re in luck
Think about it. Environments, economies, lives, and our species’ chances of survival are being destroyed by addicts who do not want to know the money and power they crave, approval they seek, and symbols they flaunt are symptomatic of a pathological disorder.
For the first time in history it’s possible to use sophisticated equipment to expose the pathology for what it is.
The internet is rife with papers and the equipment for exploring inner space is improving every year. Researchers did the heavy lifting by linking dopamine to autism, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, as well as addictions to heroin, cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, salt, sugar, junk foods, gambling, tanning, video games, social media, and on and on.
Conveniently/suspiciously/understandably missing are scientific papers linking dopamine to the most common and destructive addictions to money, belief systems, or Maslow’s psychological deficiency needs for safety/power, acceptance/approval/attention, and esteem/status.
There’s method to their ignorance. It turns out the scientific model was built by peer-approval addicts for peer-approval addicts and structured to discourage, exclude, and/or eliminate visionaries, innovators, independent thinkers, such as Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Gates.
To complicate matters, researchers are no more interested in being rejected or having addictions exposed than the money/power/status addicts funding their research.
To change the course of history
All you have to do is put up a billion dollars and deal with a few years of unrelenting attacks, mockery, dismissals, and vitriol.
When the dust settles, and it will, you’ll be immortalized for spearheading the most significant paradigm shift in history.
Why a billion dollars?
Getting the neurocentrism word out isn’t a grass roots movement. Helping the initial wave of early adopters find the courage to stand up and be ignored won’t be easy or cheap because the challenge requires exposing centuries of entrenched deceptions, dishonesty, and addictions cleverly passing for cherished customs, honored traditions, acceptable habits, and admirable behaviors. And while the equipment, researchers, consultants, administrators, marketers, lawyers, and other tools required to make it happen are out there, the costs would bankrupt a millionaire long before a tipping point was reached where enough open-minded individuals understood the detractors’ desperate efforts effectively demonstrate how addicts react when their dopamine flow is threatened.
Taking on a hoax benefiting powerful addicts since time immemorial requires a strong-will and deep pockets.
Widespread money, power, and status addictions ensure a never ending supply of colluding addicts in high places. Like the bullies who ganged up on Galileo, the addicts with the most to lose inevitably control the resources, positions, connections, incentives, and armies of flunkies ready, willing, and able to protect their masters’ dopamine flow. (Is Harvard’s Howard Shaffer This Century’s Cardinal Bellarmine?)
Sans serious backing, Carl Sagan wouldn’t have been able to explain neurocentrism.
Financing is key to attracting the best scientific minds, ready, willing, and able to extend current research into links between dopamine and addictions to money, belief systems, safety, power, acceptance, approval, esteem, and status. Next come the marketers, lawyers, lobbyists, administrators, and assorted guns for hire who’ll work for anyone offering money.
Money is especially addictive because it can be easily converted into drugs, bets, sex, safety, power, acceptance, approval, attention, status, more money, and other popular dopamine triggers.
You’ll be OK as long as safety addicts ignore you while esteem addicts get off on the dopamine triggered by the delusion of being smarter.
When the easily threatened realize the research can’t be ignored or disproved, the enormous threat will unite a confederacy of addicts who’ll push back hard and play dirty.
That’s when you’ll know you’re winning.
Still, the only way to prevail is to fight serious money with serious money. The ante is a billion dollars. Ten billion would be better but, with resolve, frugality, and creativity, one billion can do it.
Are you in?
This is not for the faint of heart, mere millionaires, or anyone whose dopamine flow is threatened by what others say about them. But it is a once in a millennium opportunity, the challenge of a lifetime, and a chance to make a monumental difference, all wrapped into one.
No sane society would allow junkies to determine the future of our species, yet much more dangerous addicts, who trigger their dopamine with power, money, and status, are free to wreak havoc on a grand scale. And for what? TO SCORE THE SAME DOPAMINE SQUIRTS IN PRIMITIVE BRAINS THAT JUNKIES TRIGGER WITH HEROIN.
Nothing will change until a driven, determined, dynamic personality, with serious financial clout, challenges and exposes the deceptions, delusions, hypocrisies, ignorance, and addictions responsible for all man-made problems.
Help enough early adopters rise above their dopamine-induced fears and you’ll change the course of history.
That’s what Galileo accomplished by standing up for heliocentrism. That’s what you’ll accomplish by standing up for neurocentrism.
The species you save could be your own
“If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.” – Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. / Decline of Heroes
If interested:
Contact: Charles@DopamineProject.org
Subject: Serious, smart, and ready to put up a billion dollars.
Sincerely,
Charles Lyell
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