Post by Admin on Jan 27, 2024 12:38:34 GMT
The fascinating science of pleasure goes way beyond dopamine
psyche.co/ideas/the-fascinating-science-of-pleasure-goes-way-beyond-dopamine
Pleasure and happiness are too important for our mental health to be reduced to the single brain chemical dopamine
If you’ve been a neuroscientist for two decades and counting, you take notice when your field begins popping up in the mainstream discourse. While this is usually a good thing (it’s mostly helpful when one’s field receives public attention), it can also go too far, introducing confusion and misunderstanding into an already complex matter.
Case in point: dopamine, one of the many, many chemicals (aka neurotransmitters) found in the human brain, where it has many functions. However, if you were to go solely by the context in which dopamine is mentioned in much of modern culture, you’d be forgiven for concluding that it has just one fundamental, very specific, function in the human brain – producing happiness and pleasure.
‘Here’s How To Boost Your Dopamine Levels’; ‘Simple Tips To Get Your Dopamine Flowing’; ‘The New Trend For Dopamine Fasting’; ‘This [Website/App/Device/Activity] Is Compelling Because It Manipulates Your Dopamine System’: these are just a few examples from online news stories and blogs, out of tens of thousands. The overall message from such articles is consistent and clear: the more dopamine there is in your brain, the more pleasure you experience, and the happier you will be.
To be fair, it’s by no means a bad thing if people are more aware of the biological workings of their brains, and dopamine is indeed an integral component in the neuroscience of how we experience happiness.
Our ability to experience pleasure, as in the fundamental sensation of something being enjoyable or ‘nice’, is a product of what’s known as the ‘reward pathway’, a small but crucial circuit found deep within the brain. As you might suspect, dopamine is the main neurotransmitter involved in the function of the reward pathway. Hence why it’s often called the dopamine reward pathway. So, if the activity of dopamine in the brain makes a vital contribution to the sensation of pleasure, and pleasure is a key aspect of happiness, then it stands to reason that boosting your dopamine levels will make you happier, right?
There’s a superficial logic to this way of looking at things. Unfortunately, the logic doesn’t hold given the daunting complexity and interconnectedness of our brains. There’s a wealth of evidence to demonstrate that simply ‘boosting your dopamine’ doesn’t automatically result in happiness. And it comes via research into Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that develops when the substantia nigra, a region of the midbrain involved in movement coordination (among other things), starts to die. Similar to the reward pathway, dopamine also plays a vital role in the function of the substantia nigra. The go-to therapy for Parkinson’s disease is the drug levodopa, which masks the symptoms of Parkinson’s by increasing the availability of dopamine in the brain, thus compensating for the loss of the substantia nigra.
psyche.co/ideas/the-fascinating-science-of-pleasure-goes-way-beyond-dopamine
Pleasure and happiness are too important for our mental health to be reduced to the single brain chemical dopamine
If you’ve been a neuroscientist for two decades and counting, you take notice when your field begins popping up in the mainstream discourse. While this is usually a good thing (it’s mostly helpful when one’s field receives public attention), it can also go too far, introducing confusion and misunderstanding into an already complex matter.
Case in point: dopamine, one of the many, many chemicals (aka neurotransmitters) found in the human brain, where it has many functions. However, if you were to go solely by the context in which dopamine is mentioned in much of modern culture, you’d be forgiven for concluding that it has just one fundamental, very specific, function in the human brain – producing happiness and pleasure.
‘Here’s How To Boost Your Dopamine Levels’; ‘Simple Tips To Get Your Dopamine Flowing’; ‘The New Trend For Dopamine Fasting’; ‘This [Website/App/Device/Activity] Is Compelling Because It Manipulates Your Dopamine System’: these are just a few examples from online news stories and blogs, out of tens of thousands. The overall message from such articles is consistent and clear: the more dopamine there is in your brain, the more pleasure you experience, and the happier you will be.
To be fair, it’s by no means a bad thing if people are more aware of the biological workings of their brains, and dopamine is indeed an integral component in the neuroscience of how we experience happiness.
Our ability to experience pleasure, as in the fundamental sensation of something being enjoyable or ‘nice’, is a product of what’s known as the ‘reward pathway’, a small but crucial circuit found deep within the brain. As you might suspect, dopamine is the main neurotransmitter involved in the function of the reward pathway. Hence why it’s often called the dopamine reward pathway. So, if the activity of dopamine in the brain makes a vital contribution to the sensation of pleasure, and pleasure is a key aspect of happiness, then it stands to reason that boosting your dopamine levels will make you happier, right?
There’s a superficial logic to this way of looking at things. Unfortunately, the logic doesn’t hold given the daunting complexity and interconnectedness of our brains. There’s a wealth of evidence to demonstrate that simply ‘boosting your dopamine’ doesn’t automatically result in happiness. And it comes via research into Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that develops when the substantia nigra, a region of the midbrain involved in movement coordination (among other things), starts to die. Similar to the reward pathway, dopamine also plays a vital role in the function of the substantia nigra. The go-to therapy for Parkinson’s disease is the drug levodopa, which masks the symptoms of Parkinson’s by increasing the availability of dopamine in the brain, thus compensating for the loss of the substantia nigra.