dopamine and yours

“Often, depressed people say they don’t want to go out with their friends,” says Salamone. But it’s not that they don’t experience pleasure, he says – if their friends were around, many depressed people could have fun.

“Low levels of dopamine make people and other animals less likely to work for things, so it has more to do with motivation and cost/... See more

In this view, dopamine does not signify how pleasant an experience will be but how much value it has to the organism at that particular moment. Schultz notes that dopamine neurons do not distinguish among different types of reward. “They're only interested in the value,” he says. “They don't care whether it's food reward or liquid reward or money. ... See more

“The problem with things that release a lot of dopamine all at once is that our brains have to compensate. But this is really the key point — our brains don’t just then bring our dopamine firing back to baseline level,” she said. “It actually pushes dopamine levels below baseline. We go into a dopamine deficit state. That’s the way the brain restor... 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.”

Our dopamine economy, or what historian David Courtwright has called “limbic capitalism,” is driving this change, aided by transformational technology that has increased not just access but also drug numbers, variety, and potency.

Schultz suggests dopamine serves as a common currency system for desire.

In a 2017 interview, Ev Williams (the founder of Twitter), said something that has stuck with me since: “the trouble with algorithms, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it trie... See more

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