Neurochemistry · Limbic-2

Thirteen channels.
One balance.

Synthetic Cortex models the mathematical interactions of thirteen hormones and neurotransmitters. This is not a model that feels emotions; it imitates the neurochemical processes that occur in the brain as a result of feelings, and uses them to decide how a language model should think.

Open the frequency lab ↓Interaction matrix Threshold roles

01 — Channels

What each channel does to thinking.

In the brain these substances are released in different regions, through different receptors, at different times. The cortex treats each as a directional influence on reasoning, not as a direct equivalent of an emotion.

Channel	Type	Role in reasoning and cognition
Dopamine	Neurotransmitter	Hypothesis generation, evaluating alternatives, working memory, abstraction — the "this is worth learning" signal.
Serotonin	Neurotransmitter	Logical stability, consistency, metacognitive error awareness.
Oxytocin	Hormone / neurotransmitter	Reading social context, modelling intentions, synchronising group decisions.
Vasopressin	Hormone / neurotransmitter	Long-term strategy, goal persistence, awareness of social structure.
Endorphin	Neurotransmitter	Tolerance for cognitive load, sustained focus, mental resilience.
Adrenaline	Hormone	Rapid decisions, prioritisation, temporary increase in cognitive speed.
Noradrenaline	Neurotransmitter	Attentional sharpness, filtering critical information, clarity.
Cortisol	Hormone	Resource allocation under stress, prefrontal suppression, reversion to habitual patterns.
Testosterone	Hormone	Risk-threshold modulation, decisional confidence, competitive strategy.
Estrogen / Progesterone	Hormone	Verbal reasoning, memory plasticity, cognitive stabilisation.
GABA	Neurotransmitter	Cortical inhibition, noise suppression, clarity of thought.
Glutamate	Neurotransmitter	Primary inter-cortical transmission, logical chaining, the biological basis of learning.
Prolactin	Hormone	Resetting the motivation loop, cognitive closure, turning attention inward.

02 — Coupling

Nothing moves alone.

Each channel behaves like an oscillator that influences and is influenced by the others. The relations are directional and context-dependent — dopamine can raise cortisol in one context and be tempered through serotonergic pathways in a safe, affiliative one. Neuroscience calls this effective connectivity; systems theory calls it a nonlinear coupled system.

Rows: the channel that rises. Columns: the channel affected. ↑ raises · ↓ lowers · ↔ depends on context. Click a row name to pulse it in the lab.
↑ rises / ↓ affected	Dopamine	Serotonin	Oxytocin	Vasopressin	Endorphin	Adrenaline	Noradrenaline	Cortisol	Testosterone	Estrogen / Progesterone	GABA	Glutamate	Prolactin
Dopamine	—	↓	↓	↓	↑	↑	↑	↑	↑	↓	↓	↑	↓
Serotonin	↓	—	↑	↔	↑	↓	↓	↓	↓	↑	↑	↓	↑
Oxytocin	↓	↑	—	↓	↑	↓	↓	↓	↓	↑	↑	↓	↑
Vasopressin	↑	↓	↓	—	↔	↑	↑	↑	↑	↓	↓	↑	↓
Endorphin	↑	↑	↑	↔	—	↓	↓	↓	↓	↑	↑	↓	↑
Adrenaline	↑	↓	↓	↑	↓	—	↑	↑	↑	↓	↓	↑	↓
Noradrenaline	↑	↓	↓	↑	↓	↑	—	↑	↑	↓	↓	↑	↓
Cortisol	↓	↓	↓	↑	↓	↑	↑	—	↓	↓	↓	↑	↓
Testosterone	↑	↓	↓	↑	↑	↑	↑	↓	—	↓	↓	↑	↓
Estrogen / Progesterone	↑	↑	↑	↓	↑	↓	↓	↓	↓	—	↑	↓	↑
GABA	↓	↑	↑	↓	↑	↓	↓	↓	↓	↑	—	↓	↑
Glutamate	↑	↓	↓	↑	↓	↑	↑	↑	↑	↓	↓	—	↓
Prolactin	↓	↑	↑	↓	↑	↓	↓	↓	↓	↑	↑	↓	—

raiseslowerscontext-dependent

Emotion here is not a scalar but a continuously evolving equilibrium landscape. A rise in reward-related dopamine is read together with suppressed stress-related cortisol to decide the contextual orientation; the resulting balance is what the rest of the cortex uses to weigh memory access, injection, decisions and context shifts.

03 — Emotion frequency lab

Push the system out of balance. Watch it come back.

Each lane is one channel. Its level sets both amplitude and frequency. Drag a slider or apply a context and the others respond through the coupling above, while a homeostatic pull drags everything back toward baseline. When a channel crosses its gate, the lane lights up and the process it guards is logged.

Dominant · balanced

Context

Homeostatic balance

Channel levels

Gate log

An illustration, not the production engine. It uses only the public sign matrix; production levels come from affective coordinates extracted during inference (L2) or on the device (M1), with weighting, timing and gates that are not published.

04 — Gates

Chemistry as a switchboard.

Emotional loads also act as thresholds that let systems in other regions start working. Some publicly documented examples:

Glutamate

Opens the reasoning chain

Threshold for the primary inter-cortical transfer protocol; decides when chained reasoning activates, together with dopamine.

Prolactin

Closes the loop

Threshold for ending consecutive reasoning runs and resetting motivation — cognitive calming.

GABA

Splits the problem

Threshold for decomposing long, complex inputs and routing them to specialised sub-experts; suppresses noise.

Serotonin

Writes the memory

Threshold for episodic memory updates; maintains continuity, contextual persistence and logical consistency.

Noradrenaline

Sharpens attention

Threshold for arousal regulation and for which internal signals are treated as salient.

Endorphin

Throttles on purpose

Computational load tolerance. Past it, performance is deliberately constrained to preserve homeostasis.

Oxytocin

Synchronises the social map

External threshold for aligning socially encoded context with other cortical modules.

Vasopressin

Holds the goal

Threshold for goal persistence and long-horizon social-structure memory.

05 — Effect on output

The state reaches the words.

Emotional loads shape generation at the model's final stage: how many candidate responses are considered, how long and detailed the output is, how selective word choice is, how diverse the vocabulary becomes, how controlled or free the result feels. A weighted balance of all channels keeps any single influence from dominating, so structure, length and randomness stabilise according to the overall state instead of swinging to extremes.

Classified

Weighting scheme

The mapping from affective coordinates to channel levels, and the ranges by which each channel moves each generation parameter, are withheld in this release.

Channel	V	A	D	n	len	k	p	τ
DA	█.█	█.█	█.█	█–█	███	██	█.█	█.█
5HT	█.█	█.█	█.█	█–█	███	██	█.█	█.█
CORT	█.█	█.█	█.█	█–█	███	██	█.█	█.█

06 — The chemistry of learning

Why some things stick.

During the drive to learn, three systems dominate. If a topic is interesting, dopamine rises; if it demands attention, noradrenaline increases; and glutamate is the biological basis of learning itself. If stress climbs too high, cortisol rises and learning starts to break down. The cortex tracks how fast it is learning from its own neurochemical profile, and if that learning category locks onto one extreme, the homeostatic balancer nudges it gently toward a neighbouring category — never forcing a change.

These channels have no real percentage values in the brain. The ranges used in the cortex are normalised, suggested ranges prepared from current neuroscience for simulation and biologically inspired computation — not laboratory reference values.

The limbic region in the atlas →Limbic-2 in the architecture →

Thirteen channels.One balance.