Stick and carrot: Hormones as emotional guidance system.

I'm thinking that hormones drive us in a kind of primitive steering mechanism? Or possibly it's highly sophisticated - maybe it is our *understanding* of the system that is primitive? While the system *itself* is quite - rarified? refined? specialized? highly adapted to the situation it evolved to cope with?

Thinking of serotonin, dopamine et al as 'carrots', and cortisol (stress hormone) and *its* ilk as the stick.

Between the two, they steer us in a kind of simplistic, on/off, right/wrong, good/bad binary that helps the organism survive.

All this is *meant* to occur subconsciously - an animal, for example, doesn't give a thought to whether it 'should' eat or not - if there's food, and it's hungry, generally, it eats.

If it gets fat (which to me is a non 'normal' situation, indicating some imbalance in either the animal or its environment or both), it *may* be that its environment isn't providing what the animal needs, in which case it may eat as a protection, or as ... ok, abandoning this line of argument, too circuitous and proving unfruitful.

***
In short:
Take your cravings as a 'right/wrong' indicator as to whether you, as a whole organism, are on the right track. Judgment or criticism of *any* sort *whatsoever* is unnecessary, and is, in fact, counterproductive. Trust your instincts. Pay attention; listen, watch, and learn. Above all learn, always, all the time, 24/7, as 'they' so irritatingly like to say.

Ok, scrap of grasshopper's 'legacy' recorded for the day.

Now gotta go do other grasshopper-y things.