Braverman Test and Compatibility

I came across the Braverman test (Edge Effect Quiz) recently and would like to recommend it to readers. You can easily find it online. Here are my results:

Strengths
Acetylocholine — 40
Dopamine — 29
GABA — 22
Serotonin — 20

Deficiencies
Dopamine — 2
Acetylocholine — 6
Serotonin — 6
GABA — 12

I interpret this to mean that I am a highly creative individual with plenty of motivation to get things done who experiences a somewhat systematic lack of stability and occasional bouts of not-enough-pleasure.

I've thought about the type of women I'm most drawn to (thinking of specific people here, not some kind of ideal) and how they might score on this test. I would surmise they are also high in Acetylocholine, noticeably lower than me on Dopamine, and noticeably higher on Serotonin and GABA without being too high on either.

What this means to me is the following: someone who enjoys learning things to a similar degree as me (I rarely meet people as learning oriented as myself) but is noticeably less dominant than me, better at enjoying simple pleasures without being too pleasure oriented (I can't relate to that mindset), and enjoying a bit more stability in life without having a stability mindset (which I can't relate to).

The Dopamine issue is important. I surmise that in most couples the man would need to have a higher Dopamine output (focus, nature) than the woman to preserve sexual polarity. Exceptions would be couples where the polarities are switched (a masculine, high-Dopamine woman with a feminine, low-Dopamine man). But that is not my case. I prefer women who are lower in Dopamine than I, whom I can "dominate" (guide, motivate, make plans for, etc.).

I'm curious about readers' hypotheses on compatibility issues after taking the test.

Why I don't Write Much Online Anymore

I haven't posted much here or on any other of my websites for quite a while, and I wanted to explain why. Back in 2002 when I began writing online, there was a dearth of information and the Internet was still fairly new. Over the next 7 years I produced hundreds of articles on different subjects and designed and maintained several different websites.

As a dearth of information turned into a glut, I gradually lost my interest in writing online. I saw the average amount of time spent on my most commercial website drop from 3 minutes per visitor years back to a half a minute or less. People no longer bookmark websites or read through them like they once did. It matters less and less where information is posted; search engine algorithms allow people to find what they are looking for faster than ever.

Furthermore, mega-sites like Wikipedia or Lonely Planet (many fields have a mega-site, or several, that dominate a subject matter) continue to gain influence while niche sites like my own have to look for ever smaller niches to develop a market in.

Another issue is the global trend of spending more and more time online and on computers or smart phones. I don't know about you, but I don't wish to spend any more time in front of a computer screen than I currently do. My healthy maximum is roughly five hours a day. Of this approximately two hours is online. Many people are spending a lot more than this. While I was developing my larger websites, I routinely spent far more than this.

If I have five hours day to spend on computers, that means I have to ration my time. There is always pressure to spend much more than that. I try to spend 2-3 hours writing and force everything else I need to do into the remaining time. The only way for me to get that much writing done is to not have Internet at home, where I do almost all my writing.

Now that everyone has a blog (often more than one) and is posting on Facebook and tweeting on Twitter, I have lost interest in being a part of this online world of quick information "injections" and have switched my effort to writing books and to building offline communities with a very modest online presence. I believe I'm at the head of a new trend, so watch for more people like me.

At least where I live, there is increasing demand for meaningful, structured, face-to-face interaction. That's what I specialize in. I'm the organizer of a popular language club here in Tbilisi where people meet on different nights of the week to converse in different foreign languages. I take people backpacking into the mountains. And I'm doing more and more music-related activities.

I'm also in the process of writing two books that — I hope — will seduce people into sitting down and reading carefully for hours on end.