How Our Bodies (Usually) Compel Us To Do What’s Best For Us

Twenty years ago I did a brief study of The Chemistry of Love, to explore how our bodies seemingly compel us to fall in love in the interest of procreation. And how in the process (what I then thought was) our ‘free will’ is totally taken away from us. Now I know a little better, and I’m convinced we never had any free will in the first place. As I’ve written about at length, it appears all of our behaviour is entirely conditioned by our biology, our culture, and the circumstances of the moment. Our explanations for how ‘we’ made those decisions are merely after-the-fact rationalizations for what the body has already decided and done. Since I wrote that early article, much has been learned about the chemistry underpinning and driving most of our behaviour. We now have a reasonable but still very incomplete idea about which neurotransmitters and which hormones are ‘responsible’ for much of what we do. We are starting to understand how even our cultural conditioning is chemically…