the trouble with a big brain

a)

is that more grey matter means higher sensory acuity, and much faster processing within a given time frame. in other words, larger heads perceive more 'tigers in the bushes',  a lot faster, and have more vivid being-torn-to-pieces scenarios running all the time inside their heads.

if you could harness large heads  for positive things ,of course there is huge upside.

it is more typical that these large heads set up demons all over their environment and get tipped into horror story movies in their head. 

 not their fault, brain is wired for simulating disaster.  

so when the subconscious thinks 'how can we avoid the tiger eating me ?', it first simulates all scenarios where tiger-eats-me as well as tiger-doesn't-eat-me, and then tries to pick the latter. however, the damage is done. the mind-man has been eaten by the tiger many times and has felt abstract pain.  Some people have a 'totem' which puts in relief this abstract pain to reality, and lets them off the hook. Others, not so lucky, don't know for sure that it won't happen, and suffer endlessly.

b)

you can run simulations of others  inside your head. superb empathy.

if you don't control it, others' moods are your moods, others' personality , attitudes and behaviours are yours tool. it's like a personality prison . you also have trouble when with more than one person - you flip between cliches. ultimately you don't have a unique personality, only bits of others that you thought were worth emulating, and now you only show up when they do.

c)

watching dr gabor mate on addiction  - rationalising trauma ends up with having to assign personal responsibility to it. if it happened to you ,you caused/wanted it in some way. this cannot co-exist in your brain with the   normal person instincts of success, friends, puppies and ice cream. the first casualty is personality - you do things that are you, and also not you. a bit of the abyss is in you now. 

 so you try to destroy that mind ( here mind is a neural network system of weights that has now assimilated personal hurt along with other goals ) . 

since the mind is invisible,  you try to destroy the brain. 

your mind is now warped, as your actions feed to your image of yourself, and incite further actions.

addictions are ways to escape this pain. 

if this is not clear, here is another attempt. 

your mind knows : a 'good person' is nice to people, works hard towards positive goals.

your body does - being nice to people, working hard towards good grades, or a promotion etc .

your environment : some body systematically does bad things to you that you are not able to control. a harassment, being mean, stealing your work/credit,  and there's no recourse, no one to acknowledge that this is wrong 

your mind : let's reconcile things. If bad things happen to you ,you must've deserved it  somehow or caused it somehow due to failure on your part, or lack of virtue ( I  always thought virtue was something like attitude or moral principles, never realised 'virtue' just mean ability, like arnold has more 'pumping-weight-ability' virtue than you ( I bet that's a word in german ( w-t-f*ck!  Pumpengewichtsfähigkeit)))

no, i was wrong -virtue means 'behaviour showing moral standards', and *greek* virtue   =  ability to excel to max potential, like be the best water carrier, don't worry about being a quarter back ?)

OR

your body : bad things happened to me, i don't feel like working on my work tasks, i need ice cream or alcohol or to sack out instead of working , or yell at kid when she's pestering me to come play

mind : when you take the two things above together,  you'll see that this person does <bad thing> so must be a bad person

once this little event is part of your identity, you are now a double person, and your actions get divergent .

the dark  misinformed part of you either 

a ) starts doing bad things to reconcile with the 'i am bad' "fact" inside your mind, or 

b)  resorts to  pleasure-seeking to alleviate 

         1) the pain of the bad thing that happened to you  , or  

         2) the guilt of   doing a) above  or

         3) loss of success from all the pleasure seeking/guilt avoidance

as you can see, this is a self feeding cycle and grows exponentially without intervention.

in highly crowded regions , personal boundaries are less and people are more borg-y and hence wouldn't mind telling off someone trying to do something wrong, and vice versa. - a person wouldn't try to resort to self damaging action as the self is partly others too ( wouldn't damage state soul machinery, would you ?)

religions try to come up with moral models which allows for the self to accept the hurt and appeal to a higher power for succour and help.

 buddhism has anatman 

but, this cannot be solved by theory alone.

ajahn brahm says you need to treat addicts by engaging the part that is not warped. 

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=addictions

 https://www.verywellhealth.com/understanding-anticipatory-grief-and-symptoms-2248855 

this has been a very unorganized post .

being an engineer, one can see that the suffering inside the head is real. being a 'realist' one can see that it is simply not true and has no reason to exist. the latter doesn't give you a tool to work with, unless you develop strong 'ignorer' muscles in your brain.

again, let-go meditation.

both alan watts and nicholas cage agree - never go to war with yourself, self-improvement is a kind of aggression against the self etc etc