Dopamine: The Currency of Desire
The i of DOPAMINE stands for insight
Anna Lembke • Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
Dopamine plays a lot of roles in the brain. If you kill off the cells that produce dopamine, the animal is not motivated to go out and do things. It’ll still enjoy something — like the sucrose solution you squeeze directly into its mouth — because the pleasure systems are fine. But they won’t pursue it. If you perform an action and you get more dop... See more
Angela Chen • Please stop calling dopamine the ‘pleasure chemical’ - The Verge
If there really is some kind of singular, scalar “reward” that humans and animals are designed to maximize, might it be as simple as a chemical or a circuit in the brain?
Brian Christian • The Alignment Problem
Neuroscientist Nora Volkow and colleagues have shown that heavy, prolonged consumption of high-dopamine substances eventually leads to a dopamine deficit state. Volkow examined dopamine transmission in the brains of healthy controls compared to people addicted to a variety of drugs two weeks after they stopped using. The brain images are striking.
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