Neurological basis for the feeling of meaning
After coming up with these two theories of what I think the feeling of meaning or purpose is , the neuronal basis of the feeling was still unclear to me. I thought it might be a different mechanism than reward prediction (dopamine), or at least a different neurotransmitter, which causes a "rush of meaning" rather than the more hedonic "dopamine rush". However, I now think it may be much simpler, and reading more about dopamine (mainly Getting Formal with Dopamine and Reward (Wolfram Schultz, 2002). Pretty much all the basic claims below are from that paper) really convinced me: Both are dopamine, but in different brain regions! Dopaminergic pathways (What is a dopaminergic pathway? A bunch of axons which send electrical signals from area A to B and release dopamine in B (the cell bodies are in A, their axonal projections go all the way to B)) The brain uses dopamine in different ways. Dopamine release in one area will not do the same thing as dopamine release in a...