UConn Researcher: Dopamine Not About Pleasure (Anymore) - UConn Today

Dopamine plays a lot of roles in the brain. If you kill off the cells that produce dopamine, the animal is not motivated to go out and do things. It’ll still enjoy something — like the sucrose solution you squeeze directly into its mouth — because the pleasure systems are fine. But they won’t pursue it. If you perform an action and you get more dop... See more

Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a longtime researcher of this neurotransmitter, would like to set the record straight: “Dopamine is not the pleasure molecule in the simple, direct way it is typically portrayed in the media,” she says. “Its function is much more nuanced.”

Rather than giving us pleasure itself, as is commonly thought, dopamine motivates us to do things we think will bring pleasure. As the brain’s major reward and pleasure neurotransmitter, it’s what drives us to seek pizza when we’re hungry and sex when we’re aroused. Scientists use dopamine to measure “the addictive potential of any experience,” wri... See more