RE: why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?
January 4, 2019 at 8:43 pm
(This post was last modified: January 4, 2019 at 8:50 pm by Belacqua.)
(January 4, 2019 at 7:53 pm)bennyboy Wrote: You know, it seems to me that SO MANY people are depressed, and so many commit suicide, that it may actually be an evolutionary feature rather than a bug.
Clinical depression with dogs shows that they will cease to avoid electric shock if it comes randomly-- because one way or the other, in order to continue acting, they have to have some sense that there's a point in acting.
There's a story about Plotinus which if it isn't true should be:
Porphyry suffered chronically from melancholy, which we would call depression. His teacher Plotinus told him that melancholy is caused by an imbalance in the humors, specifically too much cold and dry. The treatment, then, is to go somewhere hot and wet in order to restore balance.
Porphyry took the advice and spent a couple of years on Mediterranean beaches, and was cured.
Though we would disagree with the analysis of the cause, the advice seems good to me. I suspect I would be cured too, if I spent a few years in the company of hot and wet Mediterranean girls.
Anyway, depression is one of the great problems of history, and the imagined causes and cures vary with whatever is the popular pseudo-science of the day. One of the reasons clinical depression is booming now is that drug companies make money from it, even though many studies show that their drugs are as useful as placebos, and certainly less effective than Plotinus' cure. All that talk about serotonin is likely to go the way of humoral theory before too long.
I don't see depression as having an evolutionary benefit, exactly, but it does seem to me an unsurprising result of inherent conflict. That's not to say that we can't make it somewhat better.
Here is a download of a wonderful book on pre-modern melancholy:
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5...4AB6FC1426
