[Radical]

I've always wondered whether someone's confidence around people they don't know depends on their physiology or simply their thought processes.

In her book "Molecules of Emotion" Candace Pert Ph.D claims people can become addicted to their emotional states. Therefore, is being introverted for example merely an addiction to the emotional state of anxiety?

This quote from the film "What the Bleep Do We Know?" explains how people can create links between specific emotional states and external situations:

"The brain is made up of tiny nerve cells called 'neurons'. These neurons have tiny branches that reach out and connect to other neurons to form a neural net. Each place where they connect is incubated into a thought or a memory. Now, the brain builds up all its concepts by the law of associative memory. For example, ideas, thoughts and feelings are all constructed and interconnected in this neural net and all have a possible relationship with one another. The concept and the feeling of love, for instance is stored in this vast neural net. But we build the concept of love from many other different ideas. Some people have love connected to disappointment. When they think about love, they experience the memory of pain, sorrow, anger and even rage. Rage may be linked to hurt, which may be linked to a person, which then is connected back to love."

So you can see how an introvert may have spent a lifetime creating a strong link between the feeling of anxiety and social interactions. This quote from the same film explains the complicated biological process of emotions:

"There's a chemical that matches every emotional state that we experience. And the moment that we experience that emotional state in our body or in our brain that hypothalamus will immediately assemble the peptide and then releases it through the pituitary into the bloodstream. The moment it makes it into the bloodstream it finds its way to different centers or different parts of the body.

Now, every single cell in the body has these receptors on the outside. One cell can have thousands of receptors studding its surface, kind of opening up to the outside world. And when a peptide docks on a cell it literally, like a key going into a lock, sits on the receptor surface and attaches to it, and kind of moves the receptor. And kind of like a doorbell buzzing, sends a signal into the cell."

The film also purports that an addiction to an emotion, is in fact, not much different to a heroin addiction!

"When they understand that they are addicted to emotions–it’s not just psychological. It’s biochemical. Think about this: heroin uses the same receptor mechanisms on the cells that our emotional chemicals use. It’s easy to see then that if we can be addicted to heroin… then we can be addicted to any neural peptide, any emotion."

So you see, is being more extroverted as simple as changing your thought processes? Or is it made more complicated by addictions to emotional states?