Is dopamine, which is so popular, really the "code for happiness"?

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Leviathan Press:

A few years ago, I watched a classic film, the Chinese translation of which is "Awakenings". In fact, the original title is "Awakenings", which can be translated as "Awakening" or "Wake Up".

The film is based on the memoir of the same name by the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks, which tells the story of his use of L-dopa to treat patients with encephalitis lethargica in the 1960s and 1970s.

Stills from Awakenings. In the film, the doctor Malcolm is played by Robin Williams, and the patient Leonard is played by Robert De Niro. © Douban Movie

The initial effect of levodopa treatment was obvious, and many patients with sequelae of encephalitis recovered their ability to move and speak. However, the good times did not last long. As time went on, patients began to become extremely sensitive to the drug and their behavior gradually became abnormal. However, although the treatment of encephalitis lethargica is highly controversial, levodopa is still one of the first choice drugs for the treatment of Parkinson's disease.

Dopamine, a chemical messenger in the brain, was once a neuroscience term—you read about it in biology textbooks—but now it’s become a cultural phenomenon, synonymous with focus, desire, and happiness.

Scroll through TikTok or sit next to a Silicon Valley software engineer at a dinner party and you’ll hear and see all sorts of dopamine-related information. Having a hard time putting your phone down? Maybe you need a dopamine detox . Worried that you’re not enjoying life as much as you used to? Try a dopamine fast , or for a quick mood boost, try dopamine dressing .

Wanting to hack your brain isn’t some niche thing. An episode of Andrew Huberman’s 2021 “Dopamine Masterclass,” titled “Control Your Dopamine for Motivation, Focus, and Satisfaction,” has garnered more than 9 million views on YouTube—an astounding number for a 136-minute video explaining neuroscience. The video, and others like it, offer a variety of techniques for controlling dopamine release. Some are behavioral, like quitting sugar or breaking a porn addiction. Others involve buying supplements, phone apps, or life coaches.

But in reality, dopamine does both more and less than popular culture has given it credit for. While dopamine-based health trends often rely on its role as the “happiness molecule,” most neuroscientists today agree that dopamine is not directly responsible for happiness. Its effects in the brain are widespread and subtle, influencing everything from behavioral motivation to physical nausea. Outside the brain, it helps dilate blood vessels, reduces white blood cell activity, and more. Even plants produce dopamine[1]!

At the same time, dopamine isn’t the only thing that drives our productivity, mood, and mood. Silicon Valley evangelists claim that if we can hack our dopamine system, we can maximize productivity. This both simplifies the complexity of human brain chemistry and exaggerates our ability to optimize consciousness.

“People like Andrew Huberman are taking the incredible things we’ve learned and applying them to marketing,” said Nandakumar Narayanan, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Iowa.

© Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images

There is some truth hidden in the dopamine obsession, but its precise function remains an active area of ​​research. From obscure neurotransmitter to cultural icon, dopamine’s evolution says more about our collective desire to control impulses than about the chemical itself.

Here’s what we actually know—and don’t know—about dopamine, and how to tell the difference between helpful advice and pseudoscience hype.

Discovering dopamine

“Dopamine is probably the most well-known neurotransmitter in the brain,” said Kent Berridge, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan. “It has a long history and a lot of baggage.”

About 70 years ago, dopamine was just 3,4-dihydroxyphenylethylamine, a chemical in the body that scientists in the early 20th century suspected was involved in heart rate and blood pressure. In 1952, the chemical got a more concise name: dopamine.

© James O'Brien

In the early 20th century, most scientists believed that dopamine was merely a half-made product of norepinephrine,[2] a hormone involved in the fight-or-flight response. In the late 1950s, German-British biochemist Hermann “Hugh” Blaschko noticed that dopamine was stored in the brain[3], so it was not just an intermediate in the production of another chemical. Swedish pharmacologist Arvid Carlsson conducted experiments that confirmed that dopamine was a neurotransmitter in the brain, but he and others did not know exactly what it did in the brain[4].

Parallel research into Parkinson’s disease led to a breakthrough: neurologists realised that the disease’s tremors and muscle rigidity were linked to a loss of dopamine-producing cells in the part of the midbrain that controls movement. Levodopa (L-DOPA), introduced in the 1960s as a “wonder drug” for Parkinson’s disease, temporarily gave immobilised patients a new lease of life.[5]

Dopamine first received attention, inspiring more pharmaceutical research. Haloperidol, a drug commonly used to treat schizophrenia, was first clinically tested in 1958—it was effective in treating the mental illness, but scientists didn’t know why. By the 1970s, the discovery of dopamine receptors in the brain led to an important insight: Haloperidol bound to a specific type of dopamine receptor and blocked it, suggesting that dopamine—particularly excess dopamine—played a central role in schizophrenia.

The link between dopamine and psychiatric disorders continues to emerge in clinical research: addiction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and depression all appear to be associated with changes in the dopamine system. ADHD medications like Adderall and Ritalin, as well as addictive drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, target the dopamine system, implicating it in habit formation, cravings, and euphoria.

© SciTechDaily

Together, these results sparked a paradigm shift in our understanding of dopamine: If this chemical is involved in attention and thought disorders, then it must play an important role in cognition.

If our relationship with dopamine is bidirectional, meaning that our behavior affects dopamine signaling and dopamine affects how we feel, then there is a lot of room for optimization. If dopamine responds to our unconscious behavior, then perhaps we can fine-tune our dopamine system through conscious lifestyle changes.

How does dopamine work?

Although it's the star of neurotransmission, dopamine is just one of the brain's many chemical messengers.

Only a tiny fraction of neurons produce dopamine: about 400,000 neurons, or 0.000005% of the 86 billion neurons. Dopamine-producing neurons are concentrated primarily in the midbrain, where they play a key role in motivation, learning, and decision-making. These functions all fall under the broad category of action selection: weighing options, deciding what is best and whether it is worth doing, and sending instructions to the rest of the brain.

Countless social media videos emphasize “dopamine levels”: everything from sex to exercise to creative expression causes dopamine levels to surge, and when you’re sad or lack motivation, dopamine levels drop.

This is an oversimplified explanation.

“[Dopamine] is a lot more complicated than just going up and down,” Talia Lerner, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, told me.

Dopamine neurons receive input from many areas of the brain: Your sensory systems, motor systems, and limbic system all send messages to the midbrain. “Some of that input is calibrating the amount of dopamine you get based on your needs,” Lerner says. She emphasizes that because dopamine neurons send signals to different places at different times, “there’s not just one dopamine signal.”

© It's Nice That

There are two main types of dopamine signals: Dopamine is released when neurons respond to certain specific stimuli. But these neurons also constantly send signals in the background, maintaining a baseline level that fluctuates throughout the day. The amount of dopamine in the brain fluctuates all the time, but “you don’t realize you’re in a ‘high’ or ‘low’ dopamine state,” Kurt Fraser, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me.

To understand what dopamine actually does when it’s released, it’s necessary to first understand what it doesn’t do.

All the neuroscientists I spoke to were clear: dopamine is not a “happy” chemical. Arif Hamid, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota, said that despite the popular belief that dopamine makes us feel good, “that assumption was disproven in the 1980s.”

“If I had to give dopamine a label,” Fraser says, “I’d say it’s like your desire chemical." But this isn’t an abstract goal-oriented desire, like craving a promotion at work. It’s a more urgent, almost animalistic kind of desire: the kind you feel when you eat a snack, check your Instagram notifications, or smoke a cigarette.

© Harvard Health

Its exact function puzzles even many neuroscientists. For a long time, they did think that dopamine represented happiness—after all, dopamine is released when happy things happen. “If you go out and the world is calling you, and the interactions with people are interesting, your mesolimbic dopamine system is clearly responding,” Berridge told me. “It makes the world feel inviting.”

About 30 years ago, Berridge conducted a series of key experiments[6] in which his team prevented laboratory mice from producing dopamine and observed the consequences. Without dopamine, the mice were unable to move themselves to eat. However, when they were fed something tasty by hand, the mice still enjoyed it. Similar behavior has since been replicated in human experiments.

Thus, even without dopamine, people can still experience pleasurable things; neuroscientists suspect that the pleasurable experience itself is mediated, at least in part, by naturally occurring chemicals in the brain called endogenous opioids,[7] which bind to the same receptors as synthetic opioids such as oxycodone.

Dopamine’s job is to make you want something, and it’s now thought to play an important role in motivation: fueling the brain as it makes decisions and sends instructions to the body. Beyond that, Hamid adds, “it’s also a really great coach” on how to make better decisions in the future.

Around the same time that Berridge and his colleagues were studying dopamine-deficient mice, German neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz’s team was recording the activity of dopamine cells as monkeys reached for treats in hopes of better understanding Parkinson’s disease. They noticed something that revolutionized our understanding of dopamine: dopamine neurons responded not to the treats themselves but to the sound of opening the treat box.[8] Once the monkeys became familiar with the task, their dopamine neurons stopped firing altogether.

In other words, dopamine responds to surprise—not the reward itself. This signal, called reward prediction errors, tells the brain how far its expectations differ from reality and is crucial for trial-and-error learning.

Dopamine is involved in motivation and learning, but the two don’t exist in isolation. Motivation allows you to focus and learn, and you can also learn to motivate yourself to do something. For example, dopamine neurons send signals to the prefrontal cortex to help you figure out what to focus on, Stephanie Borgland, a neuroscientist at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, told me. Dopamine also drives the formation of habits, which are behaviors we learn to be motivated to do, like checking Instagram notifications when we crave social approval.

© BRIAN STAUFFER

The problem is, Boglander says, “your brain doesn’t know if it’s developing a new skill or forming a bad habit.”

Once a habit is formed, it is no longer under the control of the dopamine system - which can lead to a rift between the things that make us feel happy and the things we want. This is why people with substance abuse disorders feel compelled to use drugs but don't get the pleasure from them. Newer drugs like Ozempic work on the neurons that receive dopamine signals, reducing cravings to a more manageable intensity.

The deep connection between addiction and dopamine makes the chemical an easy target for self-help guides that promise to “optimize” it to promote healthier relationships with drugs and work. But Bogland thinks much of this is “bullshit.” She’s not alone.

Dopamine Detox and Fasting: Is It Real?

As academic research on dopamine has flourished, the chemical has begun to appear in movies, music and tattoos. In 2014, I had a friend tattoo a dopamine molecule on my body.

Today, dopamine is seen by Huberman and celebrity scientists like Anna Lembke, author of the best-selling book Dopamine Nation, as both the root cause and solution to most mental illnesses — usually a strange combination of cognitive behavioral therapy, engineering optimization and Goop-style "wellness" (Goop is a brand founded by Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Since the beginning of Goop, Paltrow has often shared with users some extremely unpopular health knowledge and maintenance methods at the time, some of which have gradually become popular all over the world, making Goop a "health bible" for many female groups. Goop is also one of the important driving forces behind the rapid development of the healthy diet and nutritional weight loss market. Editor's note).

Still, all the neuroscientists I spoke to were unhappy with the media’s portrayal of dopamine. Asked about the health advice offered by Huberman and other influencers, Narayanan said they simplify complex topics “to a disservice to both science and the public.”

Take the trend of so-called "dopamine fasting," which teaches people to consciously stay away from addictive substances that trigger dopamine release, but the problem is that one chemical alone cannot completely change your mental health.

In many cases, the emphasis on dopamine seems to be more semantic than biological. When people attach “dopamine” to almost anything, they are usually just discussing habits, addiction, and control, using neuroscience terms to add scientific substance. For example, dopamine fasting is essentially cognitive behavioral therapy, but with “dopamine” as a metaphor for the pursuit of pleasure.[9] Cameron Sepah, who published a widely circulated dopamine fasting guide in 2019, even told the New York Times that the “dopamine” in it should not be taken literally—but it “makes for a catchy title.”

But there’s a reason many of us turn to dopamine technology these days to stave off urges, especially those related to screen time. In the late 2010s, startups like the now-defunct Dopamine Labs were blatantly leveraging dopamine to market neuromarketing strategies that helped tech companies exploit the brain’s reward system to keep consumers addicted to their platforms.

Neuroscientists believe that mobile apps are designed to form habits, and “it probably does activate your dopamine system,” Lerner said. Apps like Instagram and Hinge send notifications and popular matches on a variable reward schedule, just like a slot machine.

If your brain can’t predict when a reward will arrive, then each reminder will feel like a surprise: a positive reward prediction error signal via dopamine. Lerner clarifies that these apps don’t necessarily raise or lower your overall dopamine levels, but they are designed to reinforce your swiping behavior.

But it’s a stretch to say that this dopamine buildup will eventually make us unable to experience pleasure, Fraser says. Trends like dopamine fasting are based on the idea that overindulging in compulsive hedonistic behaviors can lead to dopamine “burnout,” but that doesn’t quite align with the timescales of dopamine release in humans.

© The Villanovan

Trends such as wearing bright, fun clothes to boost mood also rely too heavily on dopamine to explain something with many potential causes. Boglander suspects that “wearing your favorite clothes may modulate a whole bunch of different neurotransmitters and neuropeptides,” including serotonin, which is produced and released in a completely different process than dopamine. “It’s not just one neurotransmitter.”

Narayanan gives an example: If you buy a cupcake, eat it, and it’s delicious, dopamine is certainly part of the experience. “But reducing that cupcake experience to a dopamine pill doesn’t work,” he says, laughing. “In fact, it would make you vomit.” (Nausea is a common side effect of dopamine-mimetic drugs.)

Your brain is more than just a gas tank full of dopamine. You can’t simply boost your mood, working memory, or focus by replenishing it. The relationship between mental health, productivity, and dopamine signaling is incredibly complex, and we’re only just beginning to understand how brain chemicals affect how we feel, but Lerner believes that “at least we can say that the question isn’t whether your dopamine is ‘too high’ or ‘too low,’ because that’s meaningless.”

Although neuroscientists know more about dopamine than about many other neurotransmitters, many questions remain unanswered. Last year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting brought together thousands of brain scientists for dozens of dopamine-related presentations. “We are now entering a phase where we are beginning to realize that dopamine is involved in a lot of processes that we didn’t fully appreciate before,” Hamid said.

© Simon Bailly / Sepia

Why does the concept of “happy chemicals” resonate with us?

We’ve known for decades that dopamine isn’t strictly a “happy chemical,” but popular culture still portrays it as one. Even Franc Moody’s 2018 song “Dopamine” opens with a scientifically accurate description of dopamine synthesis, using dopamine as a metaphor for hedonistic hotties on the dance floor.

Berridge says our outdated understanding of dopamine is so ingrained that many neuroscientists still make mistakes. “They’ll write phrases that only make sense if dopamine is pleasure,” he says with a laugh. “I think it’s their old self coming on.”

Perhaps the concept resonates for the same reason that other words that were once clinical concepts, such as disorder, do: it provides a clear (arguably too clear) framework for understanding ourselves.

If we imagine dopamine as a lever that can be pulled to improve our focus, or imagine the ebb and flow that explains why we feel energized or distracted, we can regain a sense of control over our thoughts. However, the workings of dopamine in our brains are actually more subtle and mysterious.

Fraser believes that people often cite dopamine "because people know enough about it that we talk about it as if it affects our lives." But he worries that "dopamine is just a straw man" that allows some people to claim they know how to control our brains. There are many people who buy into this view. As we continue to fight a losing battle with attention, we need to take the initiative. The current problem is not our fault.

We live in an age of constant distraction. We all have smartphones, and there are concerns they are ruining our brains. As we spend more time on TikTok, newsfeeds are shortening, and songs are getting shorter.

While the volume and ease with which we access content are new, seeking distraction is not unique to our dopamine-conscious age. For centuries, humans have sought ways to escape the banality and anxiety of everyday life. As early as the mid-17th century, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote that the desire for distraction is completely natural, even for the wealthiest people: “The king is surrounded by people who think only of pleasing him, and not of himself. For even a king would be unhappy if he thought of himself.”

Once we start to lose focus, we try to get out of that state. Meditation has been ingrained in many spiritual belief systems for thousands of years as a way to seek enlightenment.

“Dopamine fasting is basically a light version of Vipassana meditation,” a focused, high-intensity meditation practice, Richard Yong, an optimization-oriented content creator (3.57 million followers on YouTube as Improvement Pill), told the San Francisco Chronicle. From a less extreme perspective, deliberately abstaining from behaviors like checking your phone a few hours before bed seems like common sense (and good advice!). It’s only when you try to directly link these behavioral changes to a single neurotransmitter that things start to get weird.

Dopamine has become a byproduct of everything it seeks to explain: impulsivity, addiction, our drive to optimize. As technology and culture scholar L.M. Sacasas writes, “It is a powerful and compelling meme, albeit one presented in its best light. For these reasons, I worry that it may trap us in the patterns it seeks to overcome. ”

By Celia Ford

Translated by tim

Proofreading/tamiya2

This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by tim on Leviathan

The article only reflects the author's views and does not necessarily represent the position of Leviathan