Disinhibition

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Disinhibition is a neurological process which results in the production of a behaviour. There are always a great number of ways an animal or individual could behave. Most of these options will be inhibited at any one time, while one particuarly salient one should ordinarily be disinhibited. Parkinson's disease is often seen as a failure of disinhibition, which leads to a patient being unable to initiate desired actions.

Outside the neurological context, disinhibition can mean:

Loss of inhibition, as through the influence of external stimuli such as drugs or alcohol, or as a result of brain damage.
Unrestrained behavior resulting from a lessening or loss of inhibitions or a disregard of cultural constraints.

Disinhibition is now being mentioned with some regularity in news articles as an explanation for how youth communicate differently when using the media of instant messaging, text messaging, and posting content on social networking sites. Because technology often provides 1) a perceived buffer from regular consequences and 2) a real buffer from traditional social cues, people will say and do things through technology that they would not do face-to-face. Youth who do not have any real understanding of the dangers or consequences of certain behavior will often talk openly about sexual issues or post provocative pictures online. While this may sometimes reflect their actual behavior, it is believed that many youth are being provocative in order to gain attention--not realizing the danger of some of their behaviors.

[edit] See also

Orbitofrontal cortex -- a part of the brain that ordinarily controls inhibition and disinhibition.
Frontotemporal dementia -- what can happen when this part of the brain goes wrong.