> Anders Sandberg wrote:
> > ...novelty-seeking behavior linked to D2...
> D2? Please elaborate. Only makes sense to me in Scrabble.
It is a dopamine receptor. Last year someone discovered that people
exhibiting Cloninger-style novelty-seeking behavior had a much higher
prevalence for a certain allele of the D2 receptor in the medial forebrain
bundle (there was an article in Breakthrough! about it). This suggests a
direct link genetics -> neurons -> reward systems -> behavior which is
quite interesting.
> > ...Still, what do we know about the neurochemistry of boredom?
>
> In 1987, in a study of genetic predisposition to alcoholism,
> C. Robert Cloninger wrote that he had a good correlation
> between novelty-seeking and levels of norepinepherine,
> dopamine, and seratonin.
>
> Anybody know if a more generalized ( ie: non-alcoholic ) study
> has been done?
One of my fellow students at Karolinska was an ex-policemen and
psychologist who had studied the chemistry of the cerebrospinal fluid from
violent criminals and esp. serial killers. His results also suggested that
many of them were extreme novelty-seekers. Unfortunately I think it is
hard to get any good results for normal people, since the individual
variances and noise seems to be high.
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Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
nv91-asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.html
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