Why do we smile when we're happy? Is it because we're happy (we also expose a similar face when we're scared), or is smiling the purpose of feeling happy?
Not sure if you're arguing for or against my point, but I'd say the purpose of feeling happy is to reinforce the behavior that got you where you are. Smiling (and the compulsion to smile, which few other animals have, though they do feel pleasure) is to signal your state of mind to your peers.
I wouldn't say (and wasn't saying) that the purpose of feeling sad is to cry or engender social signaling (parallel to happiness, the purpose of sadness is downregulation of behavior), but the compulsion to cry itself and the relief afterwards is about signaling.
I never cried tears of happiness when the primary sex hormone in my system was testosterone. Now that estrogen is, I cry all the time. Not just from hormones, but also from how happy I am not not be living a lie anymore. And sometimes for absolutely no reason whatsoever. And it's emotionally cathartic as fuck.
This entire thing is so anecdotal and from-personal-experience, it's not remotely interesting in its attempts to generalize.
That's interesting. I've got a colleague who made the same change, and she claims also that crying "as a man" is rare and very hard – as if that pathway is somehow blocked – while it comes very easily "as a woman" when taking hormones and generally helps to relieve bad emotions (or fortify good ones?). If she stops taking hormones for a while, she can't cry anymore.
As a "manly man", I imagine a cathartic cry would help to get rid of deep frustration, stress and anger, but I couldn't cry even if my life depended on it. I'm not an expert, but I feel it's more about nature than nurture – I guess males historically were coping better exhibiting an aggressive "fight" response. It of course leaves men hanging out to dry in situations where an active fight response doesn't help at all, attacking isn't possible and you have to deal with being helpless or hopeless... Cue to male (murder/)suicide.
> but I couldn't cry even if my life depended on it. I'm not an expert, but I feel it's more about nature than nurture
I couldn't either, but after seeing a therapist for some time (for a light depression), I became much more aware of my emotions. Crying became much more easy as well.
I suspect it is. Look at Chagnon's Yanomamo ethnographies, or at the Homeric epics. Or the Old Testament, or Beowulf, or Le Morte D’Arthur. Men cry at the drop of a hat in all of those.
And immediately any webGL visualizations / games / necessarily resource intensive webapps are rendered useless as they're automatically throttled back by the browser.
i7 - I conceded disk space in exchange for more ram and the higher end cpu. It works great, since I have tons of external drive space. It won't be the best for someone who has intense disk usage needs (like running multiple VMs at once), but I don't. I usually have a dozen apps running (like JVMs, SSMS, too many Firefox windows, a few Chrome, Excel, etc; the usual stuff). I really like that it spreads across monitors well. Just don't expect to run movies in HD 60fps (though Excel doesn't really need 60fps, right? You're not doing something silly like that. RIGHT?. Sure.)
Stimulants work because they activate the underperforming portions of the prefrontal cortex related to attention management.
Chalking it up to dopamine is a gross simplification.
Adderal, for example, stimulates the release / reduces the re-uptake of dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, serotonin, histamine, and CART peptides.
