11 ms·

Please stop calling dopamine an addictive rewarding neurochemical (2017)

187 points by kloch 5y ago

motohagiography 5y ago
I get the criticism, but in culture we use "dopamine" as a magic feather for separating our self from our experiences so we can reflect on them, and this article is like a bird saying, "that's not how feathers work!" They're right, but who needs to know that their magic feather is just a metaphor? Most of them are.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
542354234235 5y ago
Meanwhile, earlier today. "Dopamine, Smartphones and You: A battle for your time" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28850169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28850169
- ghola2k5 5y ago
  Since this article we're commenting on is from 2017, I think that the article you're linking (which hit the front page) is the reason this is posted.
- angryGhost 5y ago
  was searching for this comment
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bryan0 5y ago
Posted January 6, 2017
warent 5y ago
Big appreciation to the doctor doing this work. Though not sure where this becomes pedantry. Sure, perhaps some people use it to manipulate and sound credible. I've personally never taken "dopamine hit" to be interpreted literally, it's kind of a figure of speech or catchphrase to point to the complex interactions of various chemicals and hormones the doctor is referring to. For example he noted one group saying "dopamine squirt", I doubt they think the brain is literally "squirting" anything.
- kloch 5y ago
  The issue is, and the reason I submitted this article is dopamine is being grossly misrepresented as the tangible enjoyable feeling from an activity ex: "dopamine squirt" in so many articles these days.
  - __blockcipher__ 5y ago
    I don't think the article touched on it, but an interesting point is that dopamine is not just the reward but also the anticipation / prediction of reward. And there's some interesting literature basically showing that the reward system of the brain is a prediction network of sorts and that the magnitude of error in its prediction correlates with how rewarding something is; that is to say, that how rewarding something is is as much a function of the expectations going into it as it is of the activity itself. (I don't mean expectation in the sense of the high-level ego's expectation of an event but rather of the lower level reward processing system's expectation) Here's a reference on dopamine wrt reward prediction error: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00244/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0024... And here's one that kind of builds on that theory and proposes a sensory prediction error. Haven't read this paper yet: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.1645 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.164... --- Anyway as far as the article itself, the point that dopamine is oversimplified is very important but I felt the author did a frankly terrible job making that point. And they tied in a bunch of irrelevant stuff ("dopamine is a vasoconstrictor"...true but it's a bit of an implicit strawman to act as if the people talking about dopamine addiction think that its ONLY purpose is as a reward chemical)
bondarchuk 5y ago
>So please, let’s start talking about people, rather than irrelevant neurochemicals. Strange way to conclude an article that has quite successfully argued the relevance of dopamine in addiction. It's good to point out how reductive the dopamine narrative is, but overly reductive is not the same as completely false. I also disagree with the idea that pinpointing a neurological mechanism for a problem amounts to externalizing the problem. Maybe because the author is a psychologist, and not a neurologist, that they cling to this mind/body divide...
- scoutt 5y ago
  > pinpointing a neurological mechanism for a problem amounts to externalizing the problem I read it as "pinpointing a simpler reason to explain an often more complicated problem". It's easier to say "it's a dopamine rush" than "I'm on Facebook all day because I'm an insecure person and it's makes me feel bad and I don't know what else to do about it" (to mention a non-personal example). An addiction has for sure its chemical reasons, but limiting to only that when dealing with it, it's reductive (my wife is a Psycologist and I heard arguments like these many times already....).
  - dnilasor 5y ago
    > An addiction has for sure its chemical reasons, but limiting to only that when dealing with it, it's reductive Right, the point I got from this, particularly from all the examples pulled from pop science, is that folks are focusing on a reduced/mischaracterized biological mechanism instead of on the associated social behaviors. The social behaviors are the things we can (theoretically at least) actually change. Perhaps the author means to express that we should focus on whatever human behavior we think it problematic instead of "blaming" a component of the mechanism.
  - ljm 5y ago
    It's just that even with self-awareness, you're not going to dive into existential torment and intimate communication at every opportunity when "it takes the edge off" is a functional equivalent, even if you wade further into a swamp of denial with every utterance of it. The dopamine rush is just the latest iteration of taking the edge off, getting comfort in something that gives you some feelings short-term but is hugely unhealthy in the long-term. Beyond that, an excuse is an excuse. "I doomscroll on FB all day because I'm insecure and I was abused as a child" (to use a personal example) can become just as much of an excuse as "I get a dopamine hit from connecting with my friends on FB." Sounds awkward when you first hear that, but then you keep hearing it, and it becomes normal.
beebmam 5y ago
Dopamine is commonly used in patients in ICUs in ways that are totally unrelated to the addictive reward mechanism. It can function as a vasopressor in hypertensive patients, but needs very close monitoring (which is why it is usually administered in the ICU only)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  > vasopressor in hypertensive patients I think you meant hypotensive.
bloqs 5y ago
Yes, popular movements get the terminology wrong, but the intention is correct. Dopamine is obviously a critical part of neurochemistry that isn't nearly as populist-simplified as "high or low". But these movements and discussion groups get the intention and method right - much of modern economies is encouraging compulsive habits in one group of people by another for economic gain. Much of human progress is around getting us the things we want as easily and as without-resistance as possible. This is catastrophic for our sense of individual purpose and direction, but policy isn't set by something so unempirical
- tclancy 5y ago
  Exactly. It's a shorthand/ synecdoche to be used instead of rehashing the whole underlying discussion every single time.
kmnc 5y ago
I don’t really get this article… it seems to make a good argument that dopamine is not the be all end all of addiction. Yet then it goes on to show that it is indeed a component of addiction, yet one of which is complex and still not well understood. So in essence, all this article is doing is complaining about pop science and how we often reduce complex behaviours to singular explanations. But isn’t that just a part of being human? The article argues that people are more complex and we need to look at addiction in a more complex way. However, nowhere does this article speak about the efficacy of this pop science reduction. Perhaps it is human nature to try to solve complex issues by reducing the problem to something that can be explained to a lay person, even if such explanations are incorrect. Personally, as someone who struggles with gambling addiction, thinking about dopamine in this “incorrect” pop science way has been incredibly useful as a tool to help me understand irrational decision making, even if such explanations are far more complex. While we do need to guard against pop science reducing complex behaviours to singular causes, I am far more interested in whether it works or not. From listening to many personal addiction stories and hearing from clinicians, this simplified understanding of dopamine seems to be of major help to many recovering addicts.
- elif 5y ago
  Not to mention that this pop science article does plenty of essentializing on its own... Particularly when it laughs off the entire concept of individuals feeling their own dopamine levels before describing a series of commonly prescribed drugs to inhibit or encourage it... The author can't imagine people noticing the effects of their own psychs?
  - SamBam 5y ago
    > Particularly when it laughs off the entire concept of individuals feeling their own dopamine levels I agree the article wasn't great, but that line was clearly saying that the subjective experience of "feeling a dopamine rush" isn't at all evidence of a dopamine rush, since we have no idea what the individual neurotransmitters feel like in our brain (unless we've been somehow trained to recognize them, perhaps, through very controlled experiments with dopamine inhibitors). Saying "oh I know dopamine must be important because I can feel it" is, indeed, absurd. We can feel a rush. We can feel desire. We can feel satiation. And perhaps we have been told that these things relate to dopamine. So now we say we can feel dopamine. This doesn't add more evidence that it is dopamine.
dnilasor 5y ago
> mentioning neuroscience is a great way to convince people you are more knowledgeable about something, and to make your arguments more convincing. Eek, I have totally done this at a tech conference. But I try to do my hw first...
magwa101 5y ago
Pointing out vacuous nature of Simon Sinek, +1.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
avgcorrection 5y ago
I’m not a fan of the overuse of terms like “dopamine” and “oxycotin”. They are often innapropriately technical and specific—the common intuition is that pleasurable things can be addictive,[1] and that is all that 99% of people mean when they dismissively refer to something as giving a “dopamine hit”. We can just call things “pleasurable” instead of posing as if we know anything about neurotransmitters. (Not to offend the inevitable handful of actual neuroscientists that happen to be browsing this thread on Hacker News—carry on.) [1] I have nothing to say about whether this is close to the truth or not.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  Case in point: > Dopamine is connected to rewarding experiences, but not in that it makes you feel good. On Twitter recently, a man challenged me saying that pornography “gives me a palpable dopamine rush after he abstains for a few days.” I replied that this was fascinating, and he must be a thoroughly unique and superhuman person, to be able to detect and discriminate the experience of different neurochemicals.
- watwut 5y ago
  It is OK to use different words for different kinds of positive feelings. What people call pleasurable and what they call dopamine hit are to large extend quote different experiences. There is some overlap, but that is it. We can call everything pleasurable, but then out language will loose expressivity people apparently want.
zackbloom 5y ago
The absolute best review of what dopamine really does (mediate attention) and how that relates to the brain's function is this [1] writeup from Astral Star Codex on Predictive Coding. Predictive Coding is a theory of the mind which does a better job of explaining Serotonin and Dopamine's function than the more primitive ways railed against in this post. [1] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...
cblconfederate 5y ago
I read some of it... what's the point here? Addiction is not yet deciphered in the brain, but it's definitely in the brain. Whether people call it serotonin or catecholamine it doesnt matter, addictive behavior does exist and there is a physical substrate for it, whatever you call it. Dopamine won't be offended for calling her that.
- zwkrt 5y ago
  The problem with talking about behaviors’ physical substrate is that we can’t talk about cause/effect across the physical and social realms. Neurotransmitters don’t have causal effects on the “mind” any more than the wake of a ship has causal effects on its plotted course. Sure, dopamine levels change in response to addictive behavior, but they don’t cause it, and talking about causes in this realm is probably not as helpful or expedient as talking about cause I’d the personal/social realm. Reducing behaviors to neurotransmitters discards all the more complicated things we do during addiction like experiencing shame, changing lifestyle, eating, or sleeping habits, or even the higher level frameworks through which we rationalize and put value on things in the world. Case in point: how can we possibly describe quitting cold turkey in a chemical framework? People do it all the time, yet it seems to be more of an act of moral courage than of basic, biologically driven behavior. An insidious side effect of brain chemical teleology is that it victimizes us in an unnecessarily deterministic manner. “You can hardly help yourself, see, your brain is literally working against you by producing evil chemicals in insufficient/inappropriate quantities. Take $x mi drug to correct yourself!” Instead of simplified and erroneous medical speak we might as well talk of the cold-turkey-quitter as having cast off a demon from their soul. At least in that framework the individual retains agency.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    > People do it all the time, yet it seems to be more of an act of moral courage than of basic, biologically driven behavior. All behavior is biologically driven. There is zero evidence of nefarious outside forces.
- M4DSCIENTIST 5y ago
Nasrudith 5y ago
I loathe the conflation as the resurrection of the stupidest bits of puritanism, the kinds that caused people to say they want kings back. It is always used to immediately pathologicalize anything remotely enjoyable to draw a straight line between "feels good" and "addictive" to justify controling others. It plays the same paternalistic game self-proclaimed leftists love to play to manufacture consensus via slight of hand. Either the people you are "helping" either agree with you or their objections may all be patronizingly dismissed as being controlled by noxious external influnces.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> Mr. Sinek is not a neuroscientist, and has not studied or researched the complexity of this aspect of our brain. But, he knows something you don’t: mentioning neuroscience is a great way to convince people you are more knowledgeable about something, and to make your arguments more convincing. This effect was recently demonstrated by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, who showed that use of irrelevant references to brain science was an effective way to lure people into thinking that complex phenomena are simple, and easily explained by, well, the brain. Er. So. Like artificial neural nets for example?
M4DSCIENTIST 5y ago
Diffuse modulatory systems. Dopamine is in equilbrium with NorAdrenaline, Serotonin, Aceytlcholine. These four chemicals neuromodulate the biology of the brain. A by-product of using these systems is Adenosine build up in the CNS above the blood brain barrier. The biological function of sleep is to reduce Adenosine. Nordrenergic Locus Coeruleus, Serotonergic Raphe Nuclei, Dopaminergic Substantia Nigra & Ventral tegmental Area, and Cholinergic Basal Forebrain & Brain stem complexes These are the 4 pathways. Only way to fix dopamine is to regulate the other systems and downregulate D receptors. This can be done through a sustained increase in cardiac rate. RUNNING NEARLY FIXES EVERYTHING and diet. Use flux or some screen dimming program so the blue light doesn't screw with your circadian rythmns. Note dopamine hyperregulation leads to changes in muscarinic M receptors present on the heart. SOURCE: Iam a medical scientist. Have a major in neuropathophysiology.
danbmil99 5y ago
As someone who needs to take dopamine five times a day just to have my body and brain act something close to normal, I've learned to completely tune out people's memetic overuse of the word. I take it to mean just a hand-waving reference to brain chemistry. In my case, it feels to me that dopamine is closely related to various feedback systems that the human brain and body use to modulate and control everything from limb movement to attention to blood pressure.

187 points by kloch 5y ago

I get the criticism, but in culture we use "dopamine" as a magic feather for separating our self from our experiences so we can reflect on them, and this article is like a bird saying, "that's not how feathers work!" They're right, but who needs to know that their magic feather is just a metaphor? Most of them are.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

542354234235 5y ago

Meanwhile, earlier today. "Dopamine, Smartphones and You: A battle for your time" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28850169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28850169

ghola2k5 5y ago
Since this article we're commenting on is from 2017, I think that the article you're linking (which hit the front page) is the reason this is posted.
angryGhost 5y ago
was searching for this comment

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bryan0 5y ago

Posted January 6, 2017

warent 5y ago

Big appreciation to the doctor doing this work. Though not sure where this becomes pedantry. Sure, perhaps some people use it to manipulate and sound credible. I've personally never taken "dopamine hit" to be interpreted literally, it's kind of a figure of speech or catchphrase to point to the complex interactions of various chemicals and hormones the doctor is referring to. For example he noted one group saying "dopamine squirt", I doubt they think the brain is literally "squirting" anything.

kloch 5y ago
The issue is, and the reason I submitted this article is dopamine is being grossly misrepresented as the tangible enjoyable feeling from an activity ex: "dopamine squirt" in so many articles these days.
- __blockcipher__ 5y ago
  I don't think the article touched on it, but an interesting point is that dopamine is not just the reward but also the anticipation / prediction of reward. And there's some interesting literature basically showing that the reward system of the brain is a prediction network of sorts and that the magnitude of error in its prediction correlates with how rewarding something is; that is to say, that how rewarding something is is as much a function of the expectations going into it as it is of the activity itself. (I don't mean expectation in the sense of the high-level ego's expectation of an event but rather of the lower level reward processing system's expectation) Here's a reference on dopamine wrt reward prediction error: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00244/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0024... And here's one that kind of builds on that theory and proposes a sensory prediction error. Haven't read this paper yet: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.1645 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.164... --- Anyway as far as the article itself, the point that dopamine is oversimplified is very important but I felt the author did a frankly terrible job making that point. And they tied in a bunch of irrelevant stuff ("dopamine is a vasoconstrictor"...true but it's a bit of an implicit strawman to act as if the people talking about dopamine addiction think that its ONLY purpose is as a reward chemical)

bondarchuk 5y ago

>So please, let’s start talking about people, rather than irrelevant neurochemicals. Strange way to conclude an article that has quite successfully argued the relevance of dopamine in addiction. It's good to point out how reductive the dopamine narrative is, but overly reductive is not the same as completely false. I also disagree with the idea that pinpointing a neurological mechanism for a problem amounts to externalizing the problem. Maybe because the author is a psychologist, and not a neurologist, that they cling to this mind/body divide...

scoutt 5y ago
> pinpointing a neurological mechanism for a problem amounts to externalizing the problem I read it as "pinpointing a simpler reason to explain an often more complicated problem". It's easier to say "it's a dopamine rush" than "I'm on Facebook all day because I'm an insecure person and it's makes me feel bad and I don't know what else to do about it" (to mention a non-personal example). An addiction has for sure its chemical reasons, but limiting to only that when dealing with it, it's reductive (my wife is a Psycologist and I heard arguments like these many times already....).
- dnilasor 5y ago
  > An addiction has for sure its chemical reasons, but limiting to only that when dealing with it, it's reductive Right, the point I got from this, particularly from all the examples pulled from pop science, is that folks are focusing on a reduced/mischaracterized biological mechanism instead of on the associated social behaviors. The social behaviors are the things we can (theoretically at least) actually change. Perhaps the author means to express that we should focus on whatever human behavior we think it problematic instead of "blaming" a component of the mechanism.
- ljm 5y ago
  It's just that even with self-awareness, you're not going to dive into existential torment and intimate communication at every opportunity when "it takes the edge off" is a functional equivalent, even if you wade further into a swamp of denial with every utterance of it. The dopamine rush is just the latest iteration of taking the edge off, getting comfort in something that gives you some feelings short-term but is hugely unhealthy in the long-term. Beyond that, an excuse is an excuse. "I doomscroll on FB all day because I'm insecure and I was abused as a child" (to use a personal example) can become just as much of an excuse as "I get a dopamine hit from connecting with my friends on FB." Sounds awkward when you first hear that, but then you keep hearing it, and it becomes normal.

beebmam 5y ago

Dopamine is commonly used in patients in ICUs in ways that are totally unrelated to the addictive reward mechanism. It can function as a vasopressor in hypertensive patients, but needs very close monitoring (which is why it is usually administered in the ICU only)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
eurasiantiger 5y ago
> vasopressor in hypertensive patients I think you meant hypotensive.

bloqs 5y ago

Yes, popular movements get the terminology wrong, but the intention is correct. Dopamine is obviously a critical part of neurochemistry that isn't nearly as populist-simplified as "high or low". But these movements and discussion groups get the intention and method right - much of modern economies is encouraging compulsive habits in one group of people by another for economic gain. Much of human progress is around getting us the things we want as easily and as without-resistance as possible. This is catastrophic for our sense of individual purpose and direction, but policy isn't set by something so unempirical

tclancy 5y ago
Exactly. It's a shorthand/ synecdoche to be used instead of rehashing the whole underlying discussion every single time.

kmnc 5y ago

I don’t really get this article… it seems to make a good argument that dopamine is not the be all end all of addiction. Yet then it goes on to show that it is indeed a component of addiction, yet one of which is complex and still not well understood. So in essence, all this article is doing is complaining about pop science and how we often reduce complex behaviours to singular explanations. But isn’t that just a part of being human? The article argues that people are more complex and we need to look at addiction in a more complex way. However, nowhere does this article speak about the efficacy of this pop science reduction. Perhaps it is human nature to try to solve complex issues by reducing the problem to something that can be explained to a lay person, even if such explanations are incorrect. Personally, as someone who struggles with gambling addiction, thinking about dopamine in this “incorrect” pop science way has been incredibly useful as a tool to help me understand irrational decision making, even if such explanations are far more complex. While we do need to guard against pop science reducing complex behaviours to singular causes, I am far more interested in whether it works or not. From listening to many personal addiction stories and hearing from clinicians, this simplified understanding of dopamine seems to be of major help to many recovering addicts.

elif 5y ago
Not to mention that this pop science article does plenty of essentializing on its own... Particularly when it laughs off the entire concept of individuals feeling their own dopamine levels before describing a series of commonly prescribed drugs to inhibit or encourage it... The author can't imagine people noticing the effects of their own psychs?
- SamBam 5y ago
  > Particularly when it laughs off the entire concept of individuals feeling their own dopamine levels I agree the article wasn't great, but that line was clearly saying that the subjective experience of "feeling a dopamine rush" isn't at all evidence of a dopamine rush, since we have no idea what the individual neurotransmitters feel like in our brain (unless we've been somehow trained to recognize them, perhaps, through very controlled experiments with dopamine inhibitors). Saying "oh I know dopamine must be important because I can feel it" is, indeed, absurd. We can feel a rush. We can feel desire. We can feel satiation. And perhaps we have been told that these things relate to dopamine. So now we say we can feel dopamine. This doesn't add more evidence that it is dopamine.

dnilasor 5y ago

> mentioning neuroscience is a great way to convince people you are more knowledgeable about something, and to make your arguments more convincing. Eek, I have totally done this at a tech conference. But I try to do my hw first...

magwa101 5y ago

Pointing out vacuous nature of Simon Sinek, +1.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

avgcorrection 5y ago

I’m not a fan of the overuse of terms like “dopamine” and “oxycotin”. They are often innapropriately technical and specific—the common intuition is that pleasurable things can be addictive,[1] and that is all that 99% of people mean when they dismissively refer to something as giving a “dopamine hit”. We can just call things “pleasurable” instead of posing as if we know anything about neurotransmitters. (Not to offend the inevitable handful of actual neuroscientists that happen to be browsing this thread on Hacker News—carry on.) [1] I have nothing to say about whether this is close to the truth or not.

avgcorrection 5y ago
Case in point: > Dopamine is connected to rewarding experiences, but not in that it makes you feel good. On Twitter recently, a man challenged me saying that pornography “gives me a palpable dopamine rush after he abstains for a few days.” I replied that this was fascinating, and he must be a thoroughly unique and superhuman person, to be able to detect and discriminate the experience of different neurochemicals.
watwut 5y ago
It is OK to use different words for different kinds of positive feelings. What people call pleasurable and what they call dopamine hit are to large extend quote different experiences. There is some overlap, but that is it. We can call everything pleasurable, but then out language will loose expressivity people apparently want.

zackbloom 5y ago

The absolute best review of what dopamine really does (mediate attention) and how that relates to the brain's function is this [1] writeup from Astral Star Codex on Predictive Coding. Predictive Coding is a theory of the mind which does a better job of explaining Serotonin and Dopamine's function than the more primitive ways railed against in this post. [1] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...

cblconfederate 5y ago

I read some of it... what's the point here? Addiction is not yet deciphered in the brain, but it's definitely in the brain. Whether people call it serotonin or catecholamine it doesnt matter, addictive behavior does exist and there is a physical substrate for it, whatever you call it. Dopamine won't be offended for calling her that.

zwkrt 5y ago
The problem with talking about behaviors’ physical substrate is that we can’t talk about cause/effect across the physical and social realms. Neurotransmitters don’t have causal effects on the “mind” any more than the wake of a ship has causal effects on its plotted course. Sure, dopamine levels change in response to addictive behavior, but they don’t cause it, and talking about causes in this realm is probably not as helpful or expedient as talking about cause I’d the personal/social realm. Reducing behaviors to neurotransmitters discards all the more complicated things we do during addiction like experiencing shame, changing lifestyle, eating, or sleeping habits, or even the higher level frameworks through which we rationalize and put value on things in the world. Case in point: how can we possibly describe quitting cold turkey in a chemical framework? People do it all the time, yet it seems to be more of an act of moral courage than of basic, biologically driven behavior. An insidious side effect of brain chemical teleology is that it victimizes us in an unnecessarily deterministic manner. “You can hardly help yourself, see, your brain is literally working against you by producing evil chemicals in insufficient/inappropriate quantities. Take $x mi drug to correct yourself!” Instead of simplified and erroneous medical speak we might as well talk of the cold-turkey-quitter as having cast off a demon from their soul. At least in that framework the individual retains agency.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  > People do it all the time, yet it seems to be more of an act of moral courage than of basic, biologically driven behavior. All behavior is biologically driven. There is zero evidence of nefarious outside forces.
M4DSCIENTIST 5y ago

Nasrudith 5y ago

I loathe the conflation as the resurrection of the stupidest bits of puritanism, the kinds that caused people to say they want kings back. It is always used to immediately pathologicalize anything remotely enjoyable to draw a straight line between "feels good" and "addictive" to justify controling others. It plays the same paternalistic game self-proclaimed leftists love to play to manufacture consensus via slight of hand. Either the people you are "helping" either agree with you or their objections may all be patronizingly dismissed as being controlled by noxious external influnces.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

>> Mr. Sinek is not a neuroscientist, and has not studied or researched the complexity of this aspect of our brain. But, he knows something you don’t: mentioning neuroscience is a great way to convince people you are more knowledgeable about something, and to make your arguments more convincing. This effect was recently demonstrated by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, who showed that use of irrelevant references to brain science was an effective way to lure people into thinking that complex phenomena are simple, and easily explained by, well, the brain. Er. So. Like artificial neural nets for example?

M4DSCIENTIST 5y ago

Diffuse modulatory systems. Dopamine is in equilbrium with NorAdrenaline, Serotonin, Aceytlcholine. These four chemicals neuromodulate the biology of the brain. A by-product of using these systems is Adenosine build up in the CNS above the blood brain barrier. The biological function of sleep is to reduce Adenosine. Nordrenergic Locus Coeruleus, Serotonergic Raphe Nuclei, Dopaminergic Substantia Nigra & Ventral tegmental Area, and Cholinergic Basal Forebrain & Brain stem complexes These are the 4 pathways. Only way to fix dopamine is to regulate the other systems and downregulate D receptors. This can be done through a sustained increase in cardiac rate. RUNNING NEARLY FIXES EVERYTHING and diet. Use flux or some screen dimming program so the blue light doesn't screw with your circadian rythmns. Note dopamine hyperregulation leads to changes in muscarinic M receptors present on the heart. SOURCE: Iam a medical scientist. Have a major in neuropathophysiology.

danbmil99 5y ago

As someone who needs to take dopamine five times a day just to have my body and brain act something close to normal, I've learned to completely tune out people's memetic overuse of the word. I take it to mean just a hand-waving reference to brain chemistry. In my case, it feels to me that dopamine is closely related to various feedback systems that the human brain and body use to modulate and control everything from limb movement to attention to blood pressure.