Quotes About Dopamine

With chronic stress the nucleus accumbens is depleted of dopamine, biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression.

K. Kidd et al., An Historical Perspective on 'The World-Wide Distribution of Allele Frequencies at the Human Dopamine D4 Receptor Locus,' Human Genetics, 133 (2014): 431.

In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.*

This explains context-dependent craving in addiction.93 Suppose an alcoholic has been clean and sober for years. Return him to where the alcohol consumption used to occur (e.g., that rundown street corner, that fancy men's club), and those potentiated synapses, those cues that were learned to be associated with alcohol, come roaring back into action, dopamine surges with anticipation, and the craving inundates.

Schultz's group has shown that the magnitude of an anticipatory dopamine rise reflects two variables. First is the size of the anticipated reward. A monkey has learned that a light

Logically, gambling shouldn't evoke much anticipatory dopamine, given the astronomical odds against winning. But the behavioral engineering—the 24-7 activity and lack of time cues, the cheap alcohol pickling fronto-cortical judgment, the manipulations to make you feel like today is your lucky day—distorts and shifts the perception of the odds into a range where dopamine pours out and, oh, why not, let's try again.

So dopamine is more about anticipation of reward than about reward itself.

Dopamine is not just about reward anticipation; it fuels the goal-directed behavior needed to gain that reward; dopamine "binds" the value of a reward to the resulting work. It's about the motivation arising from those dopaminergic projections to the PFC that is needed to do the harder thing (i.e., to work). In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.fn50,99

In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.

People buy things in the hope that it will make them feel better," said Blair. "It gives you a momentary boost, just buying it, but not for long. It's just a stupid dopamine hit

People buy things in the hope that it will make them feel better," said Blair. "It gives you a momentary boost, just buying it, but not for long. It's just a stupid dopamine hit whereby I tell you things are going to be great and you fantasize that they are and you feel better.

The money buys the drugs, the drugs work harder and harder to trick your blackened dopamine receptors into giving a damn about living. At some point you make a choice: fight your need the rest of your goddamned long-suffering life, or fill your need until it disappears into the grave with you.

if you laugh and smile even when you have no reason to, even if your life is a complete disaster, your brain responds to the input as though it were genuine. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins are the reward, shifting the brain's state from faux happiness to genuine happiness.

The benefits of a massage include a 31% reduction of cortisol (the fear hormone) levels; a 31% increase in dopamine (the neurotransmitter of motivation); a 28% elevation of serotonin (the neurochemical responsible for regulating anxiety and raising happiness); reduced muscle

modern psychology warns against addiction, in which the 'dopamine fix' expels the long-term projects of the heart;

dopamine (D2) receptor antagonist

The theories that patients with depression lack serotonin and that patients with schizophrenia have too much dopamine have long been refuted. The truth is just the opposite. There is no chemical imbalance to begin with, but when treating mental illness with drugs, we create a chemical imbalance.

The pre-bite dopamine blast you're now getting is the promise of more bliss, and the post-bite drop in dopamine is, in a way, the breaking of the promise—or, at least, it's a kind of biochemical acknowledgment that there was some overpromising. To the extent that you bought the promise—anticipated greater pleasure than would be delivered by the consumption itself—you have been, if not deluded in the strong sense of that term, at least misled.

Brain scans are showing that a curious state of mind involves activity in the dopamine system.

We are our own walking pharmacies shooting ourselves up with our own homemade chemicals. This constant need for a fix to make you feel good prompts you to pursue rewards over and over again and strengthens the behaviour that made you want to get them in the first place. It's a vicious circle. So

I prefer to control my brain's dopamine reactions myself. Not be at the mercy of... butterflies.

As noted earlier, having a highly affectionate and responsive mother turns on different suites of genes, compared to being raised indifferently. Not surprisingly, neglect and trauma make social connection more difficult. These changes, too, are mediated by oxytocin, vasopressin, opioids, and dopamine.

A Happiness key: Maintain something to be enthusiastic about. Small/frequent goals = Dopamine hits that propel success.

Has our enslavement to dopamine—to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak—made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety