dopamine and yours

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,”... 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

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... See more

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... 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.”

The number one determinant of dopamine release is novelty.

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

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... See more

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... See more