Emotions and Effects

Published in the Kathmandu infotiser on May 2005. The published version might have been edited. 

We wake up in the morning and gets ready for, most probably the beautiful day. We fall sick, get depressed, or be happy, and all over the day and night we are always entrapped with lots of happiness, joys, pains, grieves, pain, excitements, etc. Many of us are busy with memorizing hundreds of English word meaning or mathematics formulae too! But have you ever imagined of your inside body during these emotional or mental status?

Love

We often get infatuated or fall in love. This is the buzzword among always in all walks of lives. Our body understands love through dopamine, a chemical secreted by certain nerve cells and is a type if neurotransmitters. It is responsible for pleasures, affections and loves. Moreover, your short-lived passionate love is due to the accumulations of phenyl ethylamine in your brain.

Suicide

We often hear of incidents of people committing suicide. The scientists have found that the suicidal tendencies are due to the actions of the chemical (neurotransmitter) called serotonin. Scientists noticed that the monkeys in the African jungle committed suicide and when experimented, they found that they had high level of this chemical secreted by their nerve cells.

Depression

More than 90 percent of the people suffer from any form of depression in their life time at any stage of their life. The depression is caused due to the hormone called epinephrine or adrenaline. This hormone is also responsible for anger or sudden happiness etc.

Memory

Memory is of two types - long term and short term. A person with good memory is found to have a larger hippocampus, a part of the central nervous system. But this part is increased on the basis of our labor practices in memorizing different things in daily lives. Interestingly, taxi drivers are found to have larger hippocampus than that of the normal people as they generally have to remember the entire map of the city. While memorizing things, there is a secretion of the chemicals called glutamate. Our brain is 14 hundred times more complicated than that of the entire telephone network of the world. Therefore, it depends or our daily life activities, health or labour in developing memory. Brain has immense capacity for memory than that we can imagine.

Programmed cell suicide

Not only human, even the cells in our body are found to commit suicide due to various reasons. When the body suffers due to severe diseases such as cancer on any part of the body other cells are also gets affected. In these cases, even during the injuries, the cells in the body program together to commit suicide called programmed cell suicide or apoptosis. But don’t think if our cells can suicide, why can’t we?

Smoke addiction

Have you ever heard of genetic causes of smoke addictions? Scientists have identified a gene called SLC6A39. Persons lacking this gene in their body generally find difficulties in quitting smoking. But don’t blame your genes only if you can’t stop smoking.

Caffeine, the chemical in the coffee is found to increase the firing of the neurons, which activates our brain. Thus, people take sips of coffee when they generally get mentally tired due to hectic official work.