Edit: I think I need to gay this post up a bit so that's it not too off topic... so, uh tell me guys, what's the best way to let a guy down gently? See, since I've started using Grindr I'll have a chat with most people who ping me, but I suppose that gives a lot of people the impression that you want to sleep with them or go on a date, despite the fact you have told them that you're just chatting and that you're seeing someone etc. I don't want to start telling people that I'm not interested in them in that way, that would sound kind of arrogant of me I would think, but perhaps that's just what you have to do? How do you phrase that without sounding full of yourself or a total prick?
SpaceBridge said:
Is this even possible? Im not a biologist, but I always viewed things like genes, DNA, molecules as being physical, and not determined by emotional or mental forces.
See that's what's really cool! The environment has a major role on our bodies, and almost everything has an effect at the molecular level. (The environment here means more than just your surroundings; it's what your mother exposed you to in the womb, your diet, if you drink a lot or do drugs, life events and your stress levels etc etc).
When it comes to genes/DNA, it's not just whether you have a particular variant of a gene, but also whether that gene is 'on' or 'off' (expressed). So whilst the physical DNA molecule will most likely be the same for your whole life - there is an added layer of complexity to genes concerning whether the gene is expressed. This field of genetic modifiers is called
Epigenetics. These epigenetic modifiers are themselves molecules that act on DNA and can be influenced and changed by a lot of things - so something like a stressful life event can have a serious effect on gene expression in your brain, and thus affect your mood in the long term. There are also many things that can occur in your early life (so in the womb and in your first years of life) that can impact your life much later on, but they too can be changed.
Talking about the brain specifically, the connections between your neurons are '
plastic', so they can freely change throughout your lifetime. Most commonly this process is associated with the formation and recollection of memories or changes in the brain following injury, but there is some evidence to suggest that meditation can alter our brains physically.
If you think about learning in general, when you learn a new skill your brain has changed to learn the skill by strengthening neural connections or
forming new ones. I'm not sure that there has been much study of the effects of life events on our brain, but I think that the dynamic nature of our brain explains why most of us aren't the same way throughout our lives.
tl;dr: Epigenetics and neural plasticity.
