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Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

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Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#101

Post by baxtr »

crowcroft wrote: post #84
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are antifragile. They survive disease, famine, loss, death of kin, all sorts of horrible abuse and still manage to build a great life afterwards. Look at all of the people who survived German concentration camps and still were able to live lives worth living after the fact. Not everybody, but it's clearly possible.

This is extreme survivorship bias. The way you say 'look at all the people' implies that a lot of people survived and had good lives, but this needs to be weighed against the number of people total that entered concentration camps to know if this is actually a meaningful number of people to validate your assertion or not. My guess is that someone who went into a concentration camp were much less likely to live a life…

Is it survivorship bias or plain old evolution?

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#102

Post by austin-cheney »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #82
austin-cheney wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article explains it well: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9825131/ My suggestion, and I am not doctor or providing medical advise, is to make the addictive stimulus inconvenient. Each iteration must include more steps to increase labor of effort and each iteration must also take much longer to complete. This will re-balance the brain from prior established condition. The more painful, disconnected, or c…

> make the addictive stimulus inconvenient Assumes there is a limit to the amount of effort addicts are willing to put into getting their next dose. Easily disproved by the experience of caring for opioid addicts. Lesser drugs, even. Once upon a time, a seemingly rational benzodiazepine addict got so frustrated with my attempts to get him off of it he rose up from his seat ready to punch me in the face. There are add…

There is always a limit. The realistic constraints of physical and social opportunities available to a given person are limitations irrespective of the person's quantity of motivation, which speaks to asset availability and social enabling. But none of this is relevant. The person to whom I replied is self-motivated to terminate their addictive patterns.

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#103

Post by squidgedcricket »

austin-cheney wrote: post #102
matheusmoreira wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make the addictive stimulus inconvenient Assumes there is a limit to the amount of effort addicts are willing to put into getting their next dose. Easily disproved by the experience of caring for opioid addicts. Lesser drugs, even. Once upon a time, a seemingly rational benzodiazepine addict got so frustrated with my attempts to get him off of it he rose up from his seat ready to punch me in the face. There are add…

There is always a limit. The realistic constraints of physical and social opportunities available to a given person are limitations irrespective of the person's quantity of motivation, which speaks to asset availability and social enabling. But none of this is relevant. The person to whom I replied is self-motivated to terminate their addictive patterns.

> The person to whom I replied is self-motivated to terminate their addictive patterns.

Kind of. The captain of the ship is motivated, but the helmsman needs to get his shit together.

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#104

Post by romeros »

SoftTalker wrote: post #51

I don't really see how there can be any question that chaos, poverty, moving every year, constantly changing schools, multiple and changing "parent" figures, adults making poor choices over and over, no examples of deliberate planning and saving for the future, screws up kids. They learn that life is completely unpredictable, that opportunities for reward should be taken immediately because they will not be there lat…

Facing adversity when one is young is important. Elon Musk faced it a lot and so did Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both of them credit it for building resilience in them. But again it will back fire if there is too much adversity / trauma.

In fact in one of the interviews Elon talks about implementing structured adversity.

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#105

Post by jvanderbot »

bratwurst3000 wrote: post #52
jvanderbot wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the "Flipping around" might be caused by an inability to discount the reward from the thing you're flipping to - it seems important / rewarding. It's not much different than someone refusing to work on an important thing because they can't stop thinking about this neat thing over here that feels cooler. Just to connect to the subject at hand.

hmmm yes could be that people with adhd,me for example, cant feel the reward of social contact so its hard to listen if not geniunly interested. sometimes i try to reward myself conscious of something and it works. for example i think conscious about how if i finish a little task it would make me happier. then i kind of force a reward feeling towards the anticipation to have something done. and it works. i feel motiv…

The "where are my keys" thing is the worst. I can get locked in a 5 minute loop trying to figure out the next step to leave the house. I'm busy thinking about a cool problem at work or the next step in a game, or an upcoming fun thing, and I cannot for the life of me focus on finding my keys. Or I'll go looking and get reminded I also need to do X before I leave, then start that instead, and restart the whole problem.

I used to have a little jingle I'd subvocally sing: "Badge, wallet, keys, notes, laptop, phone; Owen's fed, doors locked, leaving home". It was my checklist. It's why I'll throw my backpack in the car even if I'm going to meet friends: It just helps me put aside the preparation anxiety to just do the same thing every time.

Those routines are helpful. I also keep prepacked bags - a backpack for work, a gym bag with copies of keys for gym, etc etc. I even have two or three pre-stocked wallets for those bags or I'll get stuck in optimizing my credit card selection for an activity. My wife laughs, but she's the one who loses her phone, cannot find her wallet, and to this day has no idea where her car keys are.

Atomic Habits was helpful. It's about how to set up your subconcious so you don't have to painfully think about every decision all the time. Maybe it's made me less able, maybe not. But going to the gym at 3 has become so routine that I find myself up in the kitchen before I realize why I left my office.

I'm guessing this is all pre-emergent dementia, honestly.

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#106

Post by em-bee »

safety1st wrote: post #81
matheusmoreira wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psychiatry is the gift that keeps on giving. The strangest part of some of these mental diseases is how they're defined in terms of other people. You're ill because you fail to adapt to society. They diagnose a person with attention defict because he can't tolerate the government's mass education system. Can't sit still and that disrupts class and gets the guy sent to the principal who calls their parents and refers…

The therapist, psychologist or psychiatrist cannot make society conform to the patient. They may, however, be able to convince the patient that conforming to society is not so bad. In my experience therapists are genuinely attempting to alleviate the suffering of their patients, and reducing the conflict between the patient's expectations and society's may very well be a route to that. They are not there to teach you…

The therapist, psychologist or psychiatrist cannot make society conform to the patient

but in the last few decades we have made quite some progress in better understanding people who are not conforming, and we are adapting society to integrate them. the thing is that this adaption and integration takes decades while convincing the patient that conforming to society is not so bad takes a fraction of that time.

They are not there to teach you how to live a successful life

in my opinion actually they are. being able to lead your life is the whole point of the therapy. otherwise, why even bother?

the only realistic option is to drug the patient because they have a high case load

that is a cop-out. not in your argumentation, but in the responsibility of our healthcare system.

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#107

Post by em-bee »

LouisSayers wrote: post #91
SoftTalker wrote: post #51

I don't really see how there can be any question that chaos, poverty, moving every year, constantly changing schools, multiple and changing "parent" figures, adults making poor choices over and over, no examples of deliberate planning and saving for the future, screws up kids. They learn that life is completely unpredictable, that opportunities for reward should be taken immediately because they will not be there lat…

> They learn that life is completely unpredictable As someone with pretty much the upbringing you described, I don't think this was the takeaway. For me personally, I learnt adaptability, how to adjust to new situations and people quickly. I saw what my parents did and said "I don't want to be like that". The downside is, it's hard to answer "where are you from?", or to know where home is, and it's especially frustra…

i also had a lot of that (except for the bad decisions and lack of planning) and i also became adaptable. what i didn't learn was attachment. and it took me decades of my adult life to understand that, realize how it affects me, where it came from, and i still don't know what to do about it. my brother on the other hand suffered from depression. despite being very similar in age and thus similar experience the outcome was very different.

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#108

Post by em-bee »

taeric wrote: post #98
lazyasciiart wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arbitrary danger in nature is where religion came from.

This largely runs to my point. It wasn't the arbitrary danger that led to religion. It was people teaching that the danger was from a directed source that did. Put differently, without priests, would there be religion?

It was people teaching that the danger was from a directed source that did

i'd rather think it was the demand for an explanation for those events. and just like any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so is any unexplainable event indistinguishable from an act of god.

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#109

Post by taeric »

em-bee wrote: post #108
taeric wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This largely runs to my point. It wasn't the arbitrary danger that led to religion. It was people teaching that the danger was from a directed source that did. Put differently, without priests, would there be religion?

It was people teaching that the danger was from a directed source that did i'd rather think it was the demand for an explanation for those events. and just like any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so is any unexplainable event indistinguishable from an act of god.

For this to work, though, you would have seen a convergence of all humanity onto the same explanations?

While I think you can almost make the case that there are some commonalities between origin stories, I think you would be stretching credibility a fair bit there.

This also hits a pretty tough point with regards to other animals. Do they have religions?

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#110

Post by kjkjadksj »

romeros wrote: post #104
SoftTalker wrote: post #51

I don't really see how there can be any question that chaos, poverty, moving every year, constantly changing schools, multiple and changing "parent" figures, adults making poor choices over and over, no examples of deliberate planning and saving for the future, screws up kids. They learn that life is completely unpredictable, that opportunities for reward should be taken immediately because they will not be there lat…

Facing adversity when one is young is important. Elon Musk faced it a lot and so did Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both of them credit it for building resilience in them. But again it will back fire if there is too much adversity / trauma. In fact in one of the interviews Elon talks about implementing structured adversity.

Elon Musk is no posterchild for someone who has experienced adversity nor is he an example of good parenting.
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