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

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)