dopamine and yours

What dopamine is “really doing,” Berridge says, “is taking things you encounter, little cues, things you smell and hear, and if they have a motivational significance, [it] can magnify that significance,” raising the incentive to pursue them. Placing dopamine directly into the nucleus accumbens of rats, he notes, will make them work two to three tim... See more

The number one determinant of dopamine release is novelty.

Just like after a successful social interaction, dopamine is released after receiving positive feedback in social networks. Put briefly, these social media platforms leverage the same neural circuitry “used by slot machines and cocaine to keep us using their products,” states Harvard Medical School research technician Trevor Haynes in his piece “Do... See more

They labeled the drive that dopamine seemed to induce as “wanting” and called the joy of being satiated, which did not seem to be connected with dopamine, “liking.”

The more we activate that intense pleasure response on social media, Lembke says, the more we crave it. The repetitive action becomes less exciting and we end up needing more to give us the same pleasure we experienced with a lesser amount before. Harris likened social media to a slot machine — we don’t know if we’re going to have positive interact... See more

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

In a series of experiments begun in the 1980s, Schultz and his colleagues showed that when monkeys first get something pleasant—in this case, fruit juice—their dopamine neurons fire most intensely when they drink the liquid. But once they learn that a cue like a light or a sound predicts the delivery of delicious stuff, the neurons fire when the cu... 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

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