Seratonin

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I was just listening to a radio show called Radiolab. It was about randomness and how things we think are magic, or luck or talent, are often just random chance.

They told a story about a woman who was a teacher and pretty normal person all of her life, then she was diagnosed with Parkinson's and put on medication to stop the tremors. Well the tremors are caused by lack of serotonin, so the medication gave her extra serotonin. Then one day she went to Vegas with friends for some event. Never having gambled in her life, she became an addict. Lost her husband, gambled her son's inheritance, etc. Much later after all the damage was done, she found out that gambling addiction is a common side affect of the drug and when she went off it, the addiction vanished, but the Parkinson's came back.

This is where it gets interesting (not that that wasn't). The reason the extra serotonin causes gambling addiction is because the mind seeks patterns that allow it to predict pleasure (think Pavlov's dogs). So the casinos have all those jarring but repetitive noises and stimuli, because they know that. It seems her mind was on a hunt for the pattern, it just played out as gambling.

I was listening to this and thinking, this EXACTLY describes my relationship with my special interests. I'm always seeking patterns! My mind is on a constant hunt for the BING. I don't gamble, that's not it, but for instance one special interest is programming, and I'm always trying to find one answer to a problem for THE BING, then another answer for another BING! I also keep trying to write a program to win the lottery, but (weirdly) just today I was talking to my friend about and explaining that I don't really think I can win the lottery, but I can learn a lot about statistics and how things work by trying to predict the lottery, even when I fail to do so. I haven't put any of the money into the lottery, I'm just seeing how my numbers play out.

Anyway, I'm just wondering how much serotonin has to do with Special Interests now.

But the funny thing is, if I could get a pill that would make me not on the constant hunt and would make me like everyone else, I don't think I'd want to do it - even though I know the world thinks I'm strange and weird. My mind is always running, sometimes in circles despite myself, but it's extremely pleasurable, I imagine like an addiction to gambling. Oy, I should want to get rid of this!

Edited to fix spelling.

On the contrary, Richard Davidson, a neurologist, performed a study on autism, discovered that autism is not linked towards the lack of serotonin. Instead, individuals with autism feel "abject fear" when making eye contact. Since most signals of body language are conveyed through the eyes, it makes sense why serotonin is not being produced because the body doesn't receive the signals to produce it.

But wouldn't pursing a special interest produce it?

Btw, if anybody knows the answer to this - I was just trying to answer my own question via Google and couldn't find any articles that mentioned "special interest." Is special interest a real thing? Where did the term come from?

"Special Interest" is Aspergian for that "all-encompassing interest which supersedes all else."

I meant is it a formal diagnostic thing? I guess it goes under narrowed interests.

I just realized I misspelled serotonin in the title. Duh!

According to DSM IV:

II. Restricted, repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, INTERESTS, AND ACTIVITIES (i.e., SPECIAL INTERESTS) as manifested by at least one of the following:

A. Encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and RESTRICTED PATTERNS of INTEREST that is ABNORMAL EITHER IN INTENSITY OR FOCUS (i.e., SPECIAL INTERESTS)

Thanks, that's interesting. I wonder who coined the term.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en ... +serotonin

It's been a long day and I took an Ativan

Just a quick response there seems to be a possible connection though further research is needed as with anything dealing with the brain and its mechanics.

I don't know, but compulsive behavior and cravings are known to be mediated by dopamine (I think the OP meant that instead of "serotonin"). You could google those and autism.

On the original subject, an interesting thing is that compulsion and pleasure may be two separate phenomena. Like with OCD, a person can compulsively do something (say, wash their hands) but not derive pleasure from it (and in fact may suffer a lot of pain and anguish). But a special interest seems to me to have pleasure in addition to a compulsive element. So, I don't think it's purely compulsive. Like, people who do a lot of methampetamine (makes neurons dump dopamine into their synapses) don't develop special interests -- they just rearrange their sock drawer 100 times or some other innane task. I think special interests are a "higher level" thing, where pleasure and compulsion are combined normally but are amplified, somehow.