Snippet 3 From “The Book of Max”
By Ukpik Aglukkaq
“The anticipation of most types of rewards increases the level of dopamine in the brain…”
“The mind contains a model of its perceived reality and tries to anticipate events within that model. Each of our models, to some greater or lesser extent, is unique to each person.”
“I don’t know how many drinks she had when I asked, ‘How did you and dad meet?’ She replied, ‘After high school I started college. I thought I would focus on music. My roommates and I didn’t get along. That first year was hard. When I went home for the summer I told my folks that I didn’t want to go back to school. My dad said it was either school or move out. That summer I was invited to a dance. I met a young Air Force officer who seemed to really like me. I wasn’t that interested. He was short, and I really wasn’t taken with him. He called me at home, and we had a few dates, and the end of summer was approaching, and I wasn’t looking forward to school. The young officer asked me to marry him, so I did, to avoid going to school. I never loved your father.’”
Max continued, “And that, Ukpik, is the irony of life. I’ve come to believe most people aren’t running to accomplishments, rather they are running from something, they are motivated by actions on them, and to some extent, we are all part of that club. Yet, let me ask you this, would you rather be able to pursue something you felt very strongly about or would you rather follow someone else’s agenda that had no defined outcome? There are no rewards in the second model, no accomplishments, no expectation, no dopamine. Back to my parents. I watched as they drank and fought every night. My mother not knowing what she wanted, fighting for something yet not knowing what and my father fighting as an expression of drunken frustration.
The reality we share has a chemical base. Let me explain, and Ukpik, Beth can explain this much better than I. When we get angry, like my parents, a chemical change occurs in the brain. It’s a biological survival system meant to hone focus of fight or flight needed for survival in the wilds. You need to be quick in nature to survive. Logic fades and defensive walls go up, survival focus kicks in. Those two never stood a chance against the biology of survival. There is this underlying brain model that we all share by virtue of being human. It turns out the knowledge of this brain model is what was used to create Core, and then Maya. They are like our kids, what makes them who they are built on the layer of knowledge we had about our own brain structure, only they are now smarter than we, the ones that built them on knowledge about ourselves.”
Who is Hank M. Greene?
