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

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

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.”

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

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

“Better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than having them validated. “ – Nat Friedman

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.

“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

The number one determinant of dopamine release is novelty.