#wanting-vs-liking

#wanting-vs-liking

Lasting change begins with honest self-awareness and self-compassion. Every habit and coping pattern has served a purpose, meeting a need at some point in time.

"People tend to immediately think of neurons when they think about how the brain works. But we're finding that astrocytes, what we used to think of as just secondary support cells, are also participating in how our brains regulate how much we eat."

Dopamine is one of the most extensively studied neurotransmitters, chemicals that convey signals from cell to cell. It's the one with the highest profile outside neuroscience: often known as the 'pleasure chemical', it's depicted as the hit of reward that people get from recreational drugs or scrolling through social media. That's a gross simplification of what dopamine does; on that, researchers agree.

For my sons, those experiences proved incredibly valuable. Both of them learned to value their athletic experiences not so much for the awards they won or accolades they received but for what participating in those events did for them on the inside. In comparing their childhood experiences to my long-distance running, I realized that many of my own fondest running memories did not come from the buckles or plaques I received but rather from the internal gratification I enjoyed in completing something really difficult.

They created an artificial 'mental map', with pleasantness along one axis and bodily reactions along the other, and charted how the brain responded while watching clips from films. The results revealed clear groupings in the way that our brains represent emotion - with guilt, anger and disgust in one corner and happiness, satisfaction and pride in the other.

Paulo Coelho's assertion that he can endure defeats and pain but cannot tolerate boredom underscores a common human aversion to dull experiences. However, research indicates that avoiding seemingly tedious conversations can lead to missing out on significant mood boosts and health benefits derived from social connections.

According to the Free Energy Principle (FEP), developed by theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston and colleagues, much of what the brain does can be understood as minimizing such mismatches—a technical form of 'surprise' defined as the improbability of sensory input given an internal model. The proposal brings perception, action, learning, and decision-making under a single framework.

For my colleagues and me, whose task it is to improve population health, we architect specific health interventions because doing so gives us a measurement advantage. Through good intervention design, we (or the intervention's facilitators) can track attendance, program completion, vital signs, functional capacity, clinical labs, and downstream health utilization. Yet, despite our best design efforts, we still chronically face a fundamental challenge: program adherence.

According to a new analysis, about 55% of the observed variation in longevity across a population is attributable to genetics - challenging previous estimates of 10-25%. Researchers say that earlier numbers were much too low because they did not effectively separate deaths caused by extrinsic factors, such as accidents, from intrinsic ones such as the gradual decline of organ function. Not all intrinsic causes of death are equally heritable, the researchers found - and the results don't indicate a genetically encoded 'destiny' for lifespan, because so much is determined by environment and lifestyle choices.