I will wonder again how much undiagnosed trauma is floating around out there from before age 2. Nobody can remember it, except in their bodies. Somebody has to tell you, or you have to do primitive archeological work on yourself, never knowing for sure exactly what you are getting and where it actually came from.
But here is where I wound up: enthusiasm is something animals also have. My dogs get very enthusiastic every time I crinkle plastic poop bags or put my shoes on in the morning. This means it exists at a lower level than the social level, than the frontal cortex, than language.
Why not place it, too, in the gut? If curiosity is the opposite of trauma, then I would suggest enthusiasm is the opposite of depression. We need positive poles. It is not enough to say “I don’t want to be depressed.” What is needed is what EXCITES you, what gets you going, what . . .gets your juices flowing. . .your blood pumping. . . what makes you salivate at the thought of it.
And why not place the conditioned response in the gut as well? All this neuroanatomy is in its infancy. They just discovered the “gut brain” within the last 20 years or so, or at least its significance.
Could we not speak of trauma as a conditioned response? Isn’t it? It is with me. Certain thoughts, certain actions, and it is like a cloud descends and I get this feeling of impending doom. I can and of course have walked right through the cloud and the fear countless times–pretty much every day of my life. This is why I don’t fear the same way many people do. If you have to deal with fear all day every day, things that would normally frighten most people aren’t any harder for me at all. Public speaking, risk of death, failure: I fear all of these. I also fear shopping malls, cars, people, dogs, cats, birds, the sky, and grass. It’s part of being me. Nonetheless, I function normally to all outward appearances. It just takes a lot more work for me to do apparently simple things.
But I really think there is some very interesting work that could be done on this topic. I doubt I will ever wind up in an academic setting again (I’ll paraphrase Greg Glassman: the magic is in the discovery; only the explanation is in the science), but if I did, I think it would be a Ph.D in neuroscience/neuroanatomy.
I know seratonin is something many drugs target. No doubt there are other neurotransmitters that get targeted too. But what if you surgically altered the pathways from the gut to the brain? I think what you would get would be people without instincts, and without enthusiasm. What if you could find a way to alternately turn them on and off, so people could feel the difference, and learn to detect and process the input of the gut? What if you could figure out a way to sedate only the gut, or to slow the quantity and speed of the transmissions?
Finally: I wonder if fasting is an ancestral way of dealing with the “gut problem”.