The easiest way to check whether this would work is to determine a causal relationship between diminished levels of serotonin in the bloodstream and neural biomarkers similar to that of people with malnutrition.
Well that should be straightforward, and is predicted by my model of serotonin’s function in the brain. It would require an understanding of the function of orexin, which I do not currently possess, beyond the standard intuition that it modulates hunger.
The evolutionary story would be this:
serotonin functions (in my model) to make an agent satisficing, which has many desirable safety properties, e.g. not getting eaten by predators when you forage unnecessarily
the most obvious and important desire to satisfy (and neurally mark as satisfied) is the hunger for food modulated by the hormone/neurotransmitter orexin
the most obvious mechanism (and thus the one I predict) is that serotonergic bacteria in the gut activate some neural population in the gut’s “second brain”, sending a particular neural signal bundle to the primary brain consistent with malnutrition (there are many details here that I have not worked out and which could be usefully worked on by a qualified theoretical neuroscientist)
this neural signal bundle would necessarily up(???)modulate the orexin signal(???)
sustained high levels of orexin lead to autocannibalism of the brain through sustained neural pruning
The easiest way to check whether this would work is to determine a causal relationship between diminished levels of serotonin in the bloodstream and neural biomarkers similar to that of people with malnutrition.
Well that should be straightforward, and is predicted by my model of serotonin’s function in the brain. It would require an understanding of the function of orexin, which I do not currently possess, beyond the standard intuition that it modulates hunger.
The evolutionary story would be this:
serotonin functions (in my model) to make an agent satisficing, which has many desirable safety properties, e.g. not getting eaten by predators when you forage unnecessarily
the most obvious and important desire to satisfy (and neurally mark as satisfied) is the hunger for food modulated by the hormone/neurotransmitter orexin
the most obvious mechanism (and thus the one I predict) is that serotonergic bacteria in the gut activate some neural population in the gut’s “second brain”, sending a particular neural signal bundle to the primary brain consistent with malnutrition (there are many details here that I have not worked out and which could be usefully worked on by a qualified theoretical neuroscientist)
this neural signal bundle would necessarily up(???)modulate the orexin signal(???)
sustained high levels of orexin lead to autocannibalism of the brain through sustained neural pruning