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

We now know that dopamine is actually the brain’s way of encouraging us to act—meaning the chemical doesn’t show up after we take a risk, to reward our risk-taking. Rather it arrives right before we take that risk, to encourage our risk-taking. In other words, dopamine is the biological basis of exploration and innovation.

Neuroscientist Nora Volkow and colleagues have shown that heavy, prolonged consumption of high-dopamine substances eventually leads to a dopamine deficit state.