Grace Reed

@deergrace

she/her

41, queer trans furry trash, actual professional deer, perpetually tired // mostly 18+ but let’s say entirely 18+ to be safe

bsky

deergrace.bsky.social

Grace Reed @deergrace6/16/2023, 6:42 PM

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy6/16/2023, 3:01 PM

in general I am annoyed as a Person Who Has Taken A Physiology Class at the way our culture treats neurotransmitters and hormones as humours

oxytocin is love! serotonin is happiness (good)! dopamine is happiness (evil)! estrogen is femininity! testosterone is masculinity!

and like yes there's a kernel of truth in each of these, I'm not saying SSRIs and Adderall and HRT aren't real things, but all these chemicals have multiple functions, all are not fully understood and still have ongoing research, and there's never a linear "the more [chemical], the more [character trait]" relationship

people painting their banal opinions science-colored is one of my pet peeves. really gets my cortisol up

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in reply to @pervocracy's post:

Lexie_Plays_Fast @Lexie-Plays-Fast6/16/2023, 3:17 PM

I love how people just keep reïnventing either physiognomy, humour theory, astrology or élan vital every 50 years, with new terms suitable for the scientific culture of the era, and seemingly have since at least the time of Socrates.

Lexie_Plays_Fast @Lexie-Plays-Fast6/16/2023, 3:19 PM

Ed. note: By "love", the author does not in fact mean "love".

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy6/16/2023, 3:24 PM

it doesn't even get me mad if they admit it's magic, there is space in my heart for the ineffable and numinous, but don't try to explain why it's Scientific Actually! if you believe in magic, fine, believe in magic!

Lexie_Plays_Fast @Lexie-Plays-Fast6/16/2023, 3:28 PM

:yeah:

Belarius @belarius6/16/2023, 3:36 PM

As a matter of scientific consensus, neurons are primarily commanded to chill out by shouts of, "Yo, forGABAboutit!"

(I'll be here all week, if you've got ghrelin to spare, please check the menu and dopamine the waitstaff)

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy6/16/2023, 3:42 PM

people seem a little less excited about GABA, for some reason. maybe GABAnergics are a little too familiar and reliable? hard to build hustle culture lore around "Ativan -> naptime"

Blit @blit6/16/2023, 3:49 PM

Look this post is great, don’t get me wrong but I snorted coffee at the last paragraph. A+ no notes

cyberdoe systems @onethirdxcubed6/17/2023, 2:04 AM

Especially bad when people try to connect morality to hormones

squircular reasoning @spiders6/17/2023, 9:14 PM

was reading oliver sacks' migraine (fascinating book) and it taught me that the serotonin system is EXTREMELY COMPLICATED and not very well understood, but also, i found it rly funny that he kept referring to neurotransitters as "humoral".

im not rly sure why he does that given that he is an acclaimed neurologist but between that and him talking about how even tho science can observe correlations between neurotransitters, or electrical activity, or renal activity, and migraines, it doenst actually EXPLAIN why migraines are happening, we still have no fuckin clue really. and it rly hammered home that the popular idea of nt's as "juice that does x" is so fucking simplistic and uninformed its basically Humoral System 2

the other thing that hammered this home for me is that my favoriet secondary chemistry in plants is the tropane alkaloids of solanaceae, and i was struck by how, nobody's really been able to stereotype acetylcholine. when acetylcholine is fucked up in the body, so many weird things happen at once and i feel like surely the other molecules are equally complex in what they do (like, the migraine-serotonin connection! what?? why! we dunno! brain goo!), just ppl have stereotyped them because theres something they can easily point to.

sorry if this was completely incoherent im not a neurologist