Eddie Mora was in a rut. His girlfriend broke up with him, she couldn’t wait for him to collect his muse to finish his manuscript and turn his life around. Near rock bottom an old friend visits Eddie and asks him if he would be willing to test out an experimental drug called NZT-48.

The drug had different effects on certain people, but the effects were euphoric in nature, enhancing the manor in which the brain processed stimuli. Certain subjects took the drug and it was like a bump in the arm sort of lift, nothing more than that. Eddie’s friend wanted to see what it could do with someone of Eddie’s talents. With nothing to lose he took his friend up on the offer. Shortly after wowing his landlords daughter on how to approach an assignment she was dreading, he was pepped up, motivated to clean up his dirty apartment and he had a fire under his ass to write that manuscript that had been collecting dust.

Attenuation:

the process of making something weaker

Eddie’s brain woke up, it started processing things that you typically wouldn’t see. Subconsciously they were there, but they didn’t matter in Eddie’s rut condition. Everything was grey. Nothing seemed to be worthwhile, but a little NZT-48 and then all of sudden, not only is the muse singing, there was nothing dampening the sound to inspire and stimulate Eddie’s muffled mind.

During the summer when I was kid, there was a waterpark near my home. I would go there during the summer. The waterpark had a large pool and it had a couple of waterslides. I remember hustling up the steps to get to the top of the waterslide to wait for my turn to jump in the slide and glide and slush my way down to the water pool below. Sometimes hitting that water with as much speed as you gained coming down the slide would chuck you a ways below the surface of water, the churning of the water from the where slide met the pool below would be busy with air bubbles and disturbed water, it would take you a bit to get back to the surface and gasp out for air. But it was fun! The trek back up the steps didn’t seem like enough to slow me down in my pursuit to “let’s do that again”.

Shortly after those days with the waterpark my family and I moved to Hawaii for my dad’s job. The town we lived in, Hilo had a waterslide, but only for a little while when I lived there. The guy who owned it had the waterslide and a mini-golf park near Cafe 100. He was saving money for his daughters college or something like that, got enough money and closed shop. With no water slides, that rush, the exhilaration needed to come from somewhere else.

There’s a spot a ways up river from a park called Boiling Pots on the Wailuku river that has some rapids that make there way into a pool of water before ultimately flowing over a waterfall. I went there as middle schooler and the place kind of had a bad wrap. My parents didn’t want me swimming in the river because though it looked safe and calm, you didn’t know if there was rain upstream that was ready to sweep you away in a torrential flood.

Looking at the rapids I missed that feeling of being escorted down a water channel, getting thrown this way and that, I jumped in. Woosh, swish, sloosh, and splooosh down I went into the pool of water after jetting through the rapids as a natural waterslide. THAT WAS AWESOME I thought, and I didn’t have to pay to get in, a double bonus.

These type of feelings or emotions come from complex interactions within the brain. The limbic system that includes the amygdala, prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. These portions of the brain process and regulate emotional responses that come from instinct and conscious thought. The amygdala serves as the alarm system that quickly assess situations for threats or rewards. It is critical for processing fear or social cues and plays a role in forming emotional memories.

Initial experiences release more dopamine, promotes learning and neuroplasticity that create new neural pathways in the brain which is why risk taking activities are often associated as “fun” when the fear of the situation is conquered. Once experience becomes habitual the behavior is automated by the striatum and relies on reinforcement loops.

It’s always a good thing to change things up a bit. Take a different route home. Try the spicy food. Sometimes unexpected things will shake that brain like a snow globe. Unexpected things like jumping in the ice cold water, warm fuzzy socks, sitting next to the camp fire or pssst * flips the bird * are things that remind you some things don’t attenuate.