It’s Saturday morning and you wake up nice and warm under your covers. You sit up, swing your legs off the bed and feel the cold air on your bare feet as they touch the ground. You stand up and your head feels the warm air near the ceiling of your room. For a moment, you wonder why but then you remember the common saying, “hot air rises.”
Your neurons have recorded the cold temperature by your feet, the warm temperature by your head, and the positions of both of those body parts to synapse them all together. This “neural glue” is called causality and it allows seemingly unrelated information to link together.
Finding a causality is the easiest way to expand and merge neural clusters and therefore release pleasure. But you already know this if you’ve ever spent time with a kid for more than 5 minutes. Every kid in the world’s favorite question is “Why?” We probe for more information because we want to form more synapses. We want to understand how our neural clusters relate to each other in order to form larger clusters and release more pleasure. In other words, you want to make sense of it all.
When tragedy strikes, we look for a reason to fill out the neural cluster. To explain the unexplainable, we create causality using stories that seem as though they fit. When looking back on your life, you’ll see the choices that you’ve made and the experiences you’ve had as the causality for who you are today.
When you form synapses to explain the seemingly unexplainable, you are met with a great pleasure and comfort. We often call this “coming to peace” and, no surprise, it often comes when you take the time to determine causality within your own life.
We all want to understand why things happen and we are all hoping to make sense of our own lives and the world around us. You are an astonishingly well adapted organism and you are unique among the billions of other humans that have ever lived. The course that your life has taken has led you to this point right now. Regardless of whether you are currently happy with this point, you can find comfort in synapsing your behavior with your life experiences. You are who you are because of the life you’ve had so far.
If you want to know why you don’t like to open up or why you don’t want to commit, try finding a causality in your childhood or an important event. Everything can be explained. When you discover your own causality, you will find comfort in the synapse.