There was the time I explored Binondo all alone. There was that instance I travelled to Balayan, Batangas, a place I hardly knew, in the dead of the night with a sleepy van driver. There was that time I insisted that I want to try and I could complete an Auzie rapel. Then there was that latest foray into an unknown area in Pampanga to meet people I only knew from the internet. Even when I was a little kid, I was always the adventurous type constantly seeking new ways to introduce thrills in my life that no one would ever dare do.

Today I found out that this could be due to an abnormally long D4DR gene in my brain. D4DR is the gene that codes for the receptor of dopamine, a brain neurotransmiter (chemical signal) responsible for feelings of pleasure and well-being as well as increasing alertness. Satisfying a hunger is enough to release dopamine levels that would normally make a person feel satisfied and pleasurable. But persons with a longer D4DR gene would require higher levels of dopamine just to satisfy them. If the dopamine levels are not met, these people tend to be depressed, inert and moody. Interestingly, pain also increases dopamine levels.

D4DR Gene

Now could that also be the explanation why I like gory movies and why I relish so much the thought of pain? I had no qualms pricking my finger and letting blood ooze from them for our physio experiments. I constantly want to donate blood to charity. I am never afraid of any cut or bruise or painful accident. In fact, I seem to relish them.

Caution though, dopamine is also responsible for a number of personality traits and psychiatric disorders. Not that I am saying I am insane, but I must be careful.

Now, of course, there are drugs that can stimulate the brain to produce more dopamine and as such improve the moods of those requiring higher dopamine levels. Coccaine is one of them. It is even presumed that those with mood instabilities caused by low dopamine levels are “self-premedicating” on the drug. Although, hard core drug abusers are more often a result of the environment conditions than the actual need for the drug.

However, most adventurers also take a huge amount of time planning out their adventures. Most adventurers, like mountain climbers, have carefully laid out plans. But then again, there are more adventures that one could say are made at a whim. Also, in my personal experience, planning for an upcoming adventure already increases the excitement in me. Of course, there are moments of apprehension but they are easily squashed and by-passed. So long as the thrill of the upcoming adventure remains, every day that it draws near and every carefully laid out plan made in preparation for it adds to the thrill it presents. In that case, dopamine levels remain to be the ones to blame for such adventurous spirits.

The D4DR Gene

“D4DR is a human gene, located on chromosome 11. It is (so far) one of the only genes proven to be directly linked to a human personality trait. When the D4DR gene is mutated or elongated, studies have shown that the individual may be more interested in danger, excitement and thrill seeking.”

~ Wikipedia

When that happens, it creates a signal in the brain that makes you feel hungrier thus prompting you to eat more food. At the same time, the body starts to store the excess calories from these additional food intake as adipose tissue or fat. Why does the body do such? Well, it is part of its preparation for pregnancy. You see, when the egg is released, the body normally assumes that it would be fertilized. In the same way that the uterus is prepared with blood-filled tissues for implantation (these are the ones that are shed and expelled as “mense”), the body also prepares the energy source that the growing embryo, or baby, would later on require.

Now what happens during menopause? The ovaries stop releasing eggs and producing hormones. That’s why during menopause, women no longer have their monthly period because the uterus no longer needs to prepare for any implantation. However, the food cravings remain. With the ovaries no longer producing estrogen and progesterone, the brain identifies that there are low levels of these hormones. The stomach then has difficulties when it is full. At the same time, the body cells need lesser calories to burn. As such, all the excess food intake is stored as fat.

But it does not mean that a woman automatically becomes obese when she enters menopause. Remember that a person becomes fat only when the body fails to burn all the calories it consumes. So an active lifestyle and regular exercise would still help the body burn all those calories, even if you do take in more than the usual.

The modern woman nowadays focus more on her career and on her ambitions in life. Gone were the days when most women’s dreams were to manage her own household and to have kids of her own. Women still long to have children and manage their own house, but after they’ve first established their careers. Due to the equality of men and women, women found their roles in society expanding and affording them more options than just staying at home and raising kids.

I don’t see anything wrong with having a career and choosing to postpone starting a family at a later age but women must bear in mind that though their roles in the world and society has changed and expanded, their bodies have not. Now men, you would need to listen to this part so you could convince your women to have kids sooner rather than later.

You see the women’s reproductive system is basically centered around the EGG. This egg, or in technical terms ova or ovum is a kind of cell that is already fixed in number at the time of birth, much like brain cells.

The Human Egg Cell

Are you familiar with the cell cycle? If not, let me briefly explain it. Cells, just like any other object in the universe has its own cycle of life and death. The Cell cycle is basically composed of a growth stage (G1, G2 and I guess you could say Interphase) and the Reproductive stages (mitosis and meiosis). This reproductive stages are further divided into several  more sub-stages. Of course I won’t go into details here.

Suffice to say, upon birth, the EGGs are frozen at a sub-stage of the reproductive part of the cell cycle. This frozen state carries on to puberty wherein the cells begin to unfreeze one by one.Every month, one EGG unfreezes and waits for the sperm to activate it. Once it is inactivated, it cannot continue it’s cell cycle and it dies. When it is activated by a sperm, the EGG develops into a baby (of course in somewhat technical terms the EGG first becomes a ZYGOTE then a FETUS then a BABY).

Now when a woman reaches her forties, the EGGs would have been almost depleted by that time. And also by that time, the EGGs that would unfreeze would have been frozen for a very long time (to the EGG’s opinion, that is) and so it would be somewhat reluctant to get out of it’s frozen state. And that, my dear reader, is the cause of all the various birth defects or congenital defects like Down’s syndrome that we are so aware of and so scared of.

Of course there is another extreme to this scenario. And that is the child could become a budding genius. So it could either be that the kid, often called menopausal baby, is a mentally-challenged kid or a super genius one. It’s a 50-50 risk.

Men on the other hand don’t have to worry about their sperms. Because unlike women, new sperms are created every 3 months. So there is no freezing just like with the EGGs. This is also the reason why women undergo menopause and men do not.

The Human Sperm Cell

Hope I make this thing clear.

So a personal advice to all the women out there who still plans to have kids, don’t wait until it’s too late. Although there are a lot of technological advancements now a days when it comes to fertilization and how to go around the problem with infertility at age 40, the risks and stakes are still high. I mean, could you really face the possibility that you would have a kid with a mental condition? Good thing if the kid turned out to be smart. But what if he wasn’t. What would you do? Are you prepared to suffer the agonies of being a parent who knows for a fact that there was something you could do to prevent a life from being this way – especially a life intimately connected to yours?

I hope you get what I mean. If we want kids, we must remember that we are responsible not just for ourselves but for them as well.

Bottomline: Kids and parenting are a huge responsibility and they do not begin at the time of birth but at the time of conception. Happy parenting everyone and hope you learned something new today!