RESILIENCE & MINDSET

Orgasm or Torture — Which Do You Choose?

Your brain rewards conformity with the same chemical it releases during orgasm. And it punishes dissent with the same neural response it produces during physical pain. Dr. Mouna Esmaeilzadeh — who attended her first protest at forty days old — explores the neuroscience of groupthink, the biology of courage, and why the most important choices in history have always been the painful ones.

I was forty days old when I attended my first demonstration. In my mother's arms. The regime used tear gas. I nearly suffocated. A fourteen-year-old boy was shot dead.

One year before that, before I even existed, my mother walked out onto the streets of Tehran alongside a hundred thousand other women. It was March 8, 1979 — weeks after the revolution that toppled the Shah's dictatorship. The mullahs were now in power, and Ayatollah Khomeini had just decreed that the veil would be mandatory for all women.

My mother wore the veil at the time. By choice. But she demonstrated for the right of others not to be forced to wear it.

She was beaten for it.

There is a quote I have always loved: I do not share your opinions, but I am prepared to die for your right to express them.

My mother lived that sentence. Literally.

What happens in the brain

On the savannah, staying with the group was a matter of life and death. Outside the tribe, death was waiting. That programme — the herd mentality — is still running inside us. It is why people behave like idiots when others do.

When we are part of a group and feel social belonging, our brains flood with oxytocin — the same hormone released during breastfeeding or orgasm. Warmth. Safety. Bliss. The neurochemical reward for conformity is indistinguishable from the neurochemical reward for intimacy.

Break away from the group, and the anxiety centre goes into overdrive. The same brain regions activate as during physical pain. Going against the crowd does not just feel uncomfortable. It literally hurts.

And it gets worse. When we are inside the group, activity decreases in the brain regions responsible for guilt, shame, and empathy. It is as if someone switches off a light in your head. You no longer see the foolish things you are doing. You become indifferent to the screaming from the room next door.

So when I say orgasm or torture, it is not a metaphor. It is what your brain registers every time you choose to agree or to object.

The courage to choose pain

It takes enormous courage — and a little madness — to choose torture. And yet the world has always moved forward precisely this way. Galileo refused to agree with the Church. Rosa Parks refused to stand up. Every entrepreneur who ever created something new chose pain over belonging.

And every catastrophe in human history has been the opposite.

You do not need to be a psychopath to commit evil acts. All you need is a group, a purpose, and a leader who gives the order.

Milgram's experiment, 1961: sixty-five percent of ordinary people administered what they believed were lethal electric shocks when an authority figure ordered them to. The Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 had to be terminated halfway through: university students became torturers within days.

The people who torture political prisoners in Iran and subject innocent human beings to the worst things you can imagine are not aliens. They are people with brains exactly like yours and mine — hijacked by a system, an ideology, a herd.

I love Mark Twain's words: "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."

The new herds

Today, we face new forms of groupthink. Algorithmic ones. Corporate ones. On social media, your amygdala burns at a dissenting opinion. In boardrooms, consensus is more comfortable than the single voice that says no.

It is easier said than done. Choosing pain over belonging requires a nervous system that has learned to tolerate discomfort — and a value system that ranks truth above approval.

But the question is not whether you can bear it.

The question is what you are worth if you never do.

My mother chose torture on March 8, 1979. She chose it again every time she stood up for someone else's freedom. She chose it when she carried a forty-day-old baby into a crowd that was about to be tear-gassed, because she refused to let fear decide what kind of world her daughter would grow up in.

That is the only kind of person who has ever changed the world.

Choose torture.

It is the only choice that separates you from a baboon.

— Mouna