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Everything you know about dopamine is wrong



Owing to how I don't want to be accused of clickbait, I will say, first and foremost, that everything you know about dopamine being a pleasure chemical is fundamentally wrong.


This is because the human brain is incredibly complex and our behaviours tend to arise from an amalgamation of factors including genetics, environment, brain structure and neurochemistry so it's very unlikely that a single neuromodulator could explain every aspect of motivation.


If you've ever wondered why your day-to-day drives can seem mysterious, you're not alone. Even the neuroscientists are still trying to figure out dopamine's role in goal-setting behaviour.


But to simplify the crux of it (you're welcome) here's what we already know. When it comes to dopamine, it is more important to be able to learn what predicts a reward than it is to receive a reward. What the hell does that mean? Well, neurons that are activated in your brain when you receive a reward (like a chocolate brownie dessert after a jog) are activated just the same when you expect to receive the reward. For this reason, neuroscientists have coined the term 'prediction error'.


The best analogy to explain prediction error is this; remember the first time you tried a new food that you were sceptical about? If the meal was delicious, your dopamine neurons would have been highly active because the food was much better than you expected. Your brain does this to make sure that you learn that your initial prediction was incorrect so the next time you see the food, you will approach and eat it.


In fact, dopamine's role is to let us know when something is better than we expected because the brain knows that unexpectedly good outcomes are worth remembering (to ensure that we repeat them in the future).


Thanks to hedonic hotspots in your brain, any time you see an advertisement for that same meal again or even just a reminder of the meal in the form of a cue, your brain will release dopamine in order to prompt you to eat it again. This is because dopamine's role is more to do with having the energy and motivation to reach your goal, rather than enjoying the destination when you get there.


The misinformation stems from people thinking that dopamine is satiating in and of itself. In addition, when your dopamine levels are increased, you're more likely to work harder for the preferred reward, which means more motivation to receive more rewards.


If dopamine sounds like one giant, juicy feedback loop — that's because it is. The dopamine system is a critical modulator of motivation. It is a central element in the brain's reward system that controls the learning of many behaviours and its most prominent target, the striatum, has long been known to occupy a key point at the nexus of action.


Importantly, the dopamine system isn't always hyperactive but it is hyper-reactive. It produces strong, instant desires based on your environment which explains why the smell of a freshly baked croissant in the supermarket pastry aisle is difficult to resist.


Dopamine's immediate draw and power is why: "Your desire for tasty food is very different from your desire for world peace", as neuroscientist Kent Berridge has anecdotally described.


Many people describe dopamine as a drug, and for good reason. It is so powerful that even when something in our environment reminds us of a reward, our dopamine systems go haywire.


Once you really understand dopamine's role in motivation, you'll notice that there is a particular psychological signature feature to this kind of wanting, it's not like all wanting — it's linked to cues, which can explain why dopamine is not necessarily responsible for how much we like something but for how much we want it. And when dopamine is boosted in the brain, it's not that we learn more or faster, as the traditional literature tends to suggest, but that things simply become more tempting.

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