Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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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,” writes Lembke. The higher the dopamine release, the more addictive the thing. activities and things that we ingest. All of us have different baseline levels of dopamine. Some of this is sure to be genetic. Some people just simply ride at a level a little bit higher. They're a little bit more excited, they're a little bit more motivated, or maybe they're a lot more excited or a lot more motivated. Some people are a little mellower, some people are a little less excitable, and some of that has to do with the fact that dopamine doesn't act alone. Dopamine has close cousins or friends in the nervous system, and I'll just name off a few of those close cousins and friends.

Chocolate, they didn't look at milk versus dark chocolate, but chocolate will increase your baseline level of dopamine 1.5 times, okay? So it's a pretty substantial increase in dopamine. It's transient, it goes away after a few minutes or even a few seconds. I'll explain what determines the duration in a minute, but 1.5 times for chocolate. Sex, both the pursuit of sex and the act of sex increases dopamine two times. So it's a doubling above baseline. Now, of course, there's going to be variation there, but that's the average increase in baseline dopamine caused by sex. Later I will talk about how the different aspects of the so-called arousal arc, the different aspects of sex, believe it or not, have a differential impact on dopamine. But for now, as a general theme or activity, sex doubles the amount of dopamine circulating in your blood.So if I were to just put a really simple message around dopamine, it would be: "There's a molecule in your brain and body that when released tends to make you look outside yourself, pursue things outside yourself, and to crave things outside yourself." The pleasure that arrives from achieving things also involves dopamine, but is mainly the consequence of other molecules. But if ever you felt lethargic and just lazy, and you had no motivation or drive, that's a low-dopamine state. If ever you felt really excited, motivated, even if you were a little scared to do something. Maybe you did your first skydive or you're about to do your first skydive, or you're about to do some public speaking, and you really don't want to screw it up, you are in a high dopamine state. Life is a slog and I think if we could admit that and take comfort in knowing we’re not alone in the day-to-day struggle, paradoxically, we would be happier’: Dr Anna Lembke. Photograph: Boris Zharkov/The Observer Okay, so we've got these two pathways. One mainly for movement. This is the substantia nigra to dorsal striatum. And we've got this other pathway, the so-called mesocorticolimbic pathway that's for reward, reinforcement and motivation. I want you to remember that there are two pathways. If you don't remember the two pathways in detail, that's fine, but please remember that there are two pathways because that turns out to be important later.

E un sentiment al anticipării că viața e pe cale să devină mai bună. Circuitele ei nu procesează experiențe din lumea reală, ci numai posibilități viitoare imaginare. Hm, cum ar fi să-mi iau o înghețată după ce termin de scris aici. Initially, dopamine was seen simply as a way for the body to produce a chemical called norepinephrine, which is what adrenaline is called when it is found in the brain."So certain things like cocaine, amphetamine, I will put in the classification of bad; I'm willing to do that, and other things are part of life: food, exercise, if that evokes your dopamine, how are we supposed to engage with these dopamine-evoking activities in ways that are healthy and beneficial for us? How do we achieve these peaks, which are so essential to our well-being and experience of life, without dropping our baseline? And the key lies in intermittent release of dopamine. The real key is to not expect or chase high levels of dopamine release every time we engage in these activities. Dopamine can do that like any other neurotransmitter or neuromodulator. So it can have one neuron influence another neuron, but dopamine can also engage in what's called volumetric release. Volumetric release is like a giant vomit that gets out to 50 or a hundred or even thousands of cells. So there's local release, what we call synaptic release, and then there's volumetric release. So volumetric release is like dumping all this dopamine out into the system. So dopamine is incredible because it can change the way that our neural circuits work at a local scale and at a very broad scale. I ask myself in such contexts what influence meditation, mindfulness, and positive psychology might have on the neurochemistry of the brain and, in this case, especially on the essential little helpers that make our emotional spectrum so manifold, wonderful, irresponsible, and prone to lunacy.

I was in college when this whole MPTP thing happened, and I remember hearing this story. At the time, I had no understanding of what it is to have very high levels of dopamine or extremely depleted levels of dopamine. There was no reason why I should have that understanding. I mean, of course, I had experienced different pleasures of different kinds, and I've had lows in my life, but nothing to the extreme that I'm about to discuss. Dopamine is what we call a neuromodulator. Neuromodulators are different than neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are involved in the dialogue between neurons, nerve cells, and neurotransmitters tend to mediate local communication. Just imagine two people talking to one another at a concert. That communication between them is analogous to the communication carried out by neurotransmitters, whereas neuromodulators influence the communication of many neurons. Imagine a bunch of people dancing where it's a coordinated dance involving 10 or 20 or hundreds of people. Neuromodulators are coordinating that dance. In the nervous system what this means is that dopamine release changes the probability that certain neural circuits will be active and that other neural circuits will be inactive. So it modulates a bunch of things all at once. And that's why it's so powerful at shifting not just our levels of energy, but also our mindset, also our feelings of whether or not we can or cannot accomplish something.Tengo un amigo que cuando escuchó por primera vez el podcast del neurocientífico de Stanford, Andrew Huberman, me dijo: “El tío mola mucho y es una pasada escucharle… una pena que se lo invente todo”. El comentario me hizo bastante gracia porque entendí rápidamente que lo que realmente estaba queriendo decir es que las explicaciones de Huberman sobre cómo funciona el cerebro son tan elegantes, sencillas e intuitivas que parecen ciencia ficción. Leyendo The Molecule of More (libro recomendado por el propio Huberman en uno de los episodios del podcast) he tenido la misma sensación ya que parece imposible que un único neurotransmisor, la dopamina, sea la explicación de tantos y tan dispares comportamientos humanos.