July 25, 2025

Although the neuroscience is hardly an easy topic, it’s by no means a dull one. There are two main systems of magical autoregulation of our bodies: nervous and endocrine systems. Which one is more impressive – hard to tell. The world of regulating chemicals is immense and fascinating, and it’d take ages to cover it all. Also, I won’t pretend I’d be better at explaining it either when so many comprohensive and engrossing material already exists (see the Materials used section). So, instead of giving you a exerpts from encyclopias and textbooks, I’d rather paint a picture (I’m a writer after all).

Key characters

Although I don’t want to overwhelm you with the unnecessary details of the brain chemistry – not to mention it’s not yet fully understood even by the scientists themselves – I still feel there is a need to at least introduce the main players of the field. I find myself fascinated by several issues that so often plague the brain: depression, anxiety, addictions, trauma, and stress. These problems so many of us face at some point in life are very often tightly intertwined: trauma may results in addictions later in life, depressionand and anxiety often go hand in hand, and various trauma sometimes result in either of those issues in later life. With the information that we now posess it is very obvious that all those concerns are not just purely mental issues, because the brain itself is not, so to speak, purely mental. It’s constantnly adjusting, changing, responding the environment, responding, and this flexibility is underlined by the chemical processes. So, it must be that the “chemical coctain” of anxiety would different from that of addiction and depression. To put it briefly, although communication within the brain goes in curcuits that do involve electrical signals, those curcuits are controled chemically, and the electrical signals are also the result of chemical reactions in the body. This is why I believe there is a need to review the chemical compounds that play such a major role in shaping our thinking and feeling.

Chemical players

It’s be so tiresome if while making my morning cup of coffee I had to also adjust my liver function and at the same time keep pressing on the chest to keep the heart pumping. All this essential activity is carried out automatically for us.

  1. Oxytocin. I’d call this one the hormone of touch.
  2. Serotonin. If you have enough of this buddy in your body, you can safely put “work well under pressure” in your CV.
  3. Endorphins (opiods). Main objective - pain killers.
  4. Dopamine. Desires and goals lie here. Habits are thus so closely related to it.
  5. Cortisol. This little lad is essential in effective learning and problem solving, it’s indispensable when you want to wake up, but have too much of it - it becomes your poison.
  6. Adenosine. This one I put because I find it so fascinating the whole waking up chemistry.
  7. Epinephrin and norepinephrine.

Anatomical players

  1. Hypothalamus. Links the master control room (nervous system in the head) with the endocrine system which then “talks” to everyone in the body using other chemicals, and reads signals from others using those chemicals too (feedback loop).
  2. Hippocampus. Very important in learning.
  3. Amygdala. The brain’s label machine.
  4. Pituatary gland.
  5. PFC.
  6. Nucleus accumbens.
  7. Dorsal striatum.

Hello dear Xavier

There are, of course, many more chemical compound – well researched and those still to be disected – that shape our minds, but those are the major players we will need to properly meet before we start our journey into three different stories.

Materials used