– Why is the brain so effective in adapting to substances like MDMA and Cocaine?
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Those substances release the same chemicals our brains already deals with (cocaine increases your dopamine levels while MDMA increases your serotonin, noradrenaline, and dopamine). So those chemicals have a more or less steady flow, like a river that might be a bit higher when it’s rain season and lower during dry season.
Outside substances like those drugs are like an alien spaceship dropping a huge quantity of those chemicals and flooding the brain. But that’s dangerous. So your brain installs a dam, widens the river bed, etc, so that next time a spaceship drops a bunch of water in it, it won’t flood — instead, it’ll flow like it used to in the past. And when aliens aren’t dropping water in it, the flow will be *lower* than it used to. So now you have to use outside substances just to function normally, and get higher and higher doses to produce the same flood.
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