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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.

by 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)

by warent 5y ago

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)