When you see headlines (or hear podcasters) talk about dopamine and other neurotransmitters, remember that neurotransmitters are merely signaling molecules.
The correct way to interpret this study is that dopamine is part of the signaling chain involved in fear extinction. The specific details of where, how, and when that dopamine moves through the brain are important.
The wrong way to interpret these studies is to think of dopamine as a "level" within the brain that goes up and down. Resist the urge to assume that taking a dopamine-modulating drug will result in this specific outcome.
Dopamine response within the brain is very complicated and region dependent. When encoding aversive stimuli (things you learn to avoid) there is evidence that dopamine signaling decreases in some brain areas while it increases in others: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462...
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Don't fall for the trap of thinking that dopamine does just one or two things in the brain.
Turned out that people learning about <scientific thing existing> just lead to them making a fetish out of it, like it’s discrete switch in their brain that gets bumped when they eat a donut.
To either sell junk or believe '$problems' are one purchase/dance/act away from resolution, matter of perspective. Folks want things, others want to take advantage.
Not to be completely dismissive, placebo/mysticism/whatever can work
Without details it’s impossible to know what you’re talking about, but it should be noted that the early phases of using stimulants or abuse-pattern usage (e.g. doubling doses before doing something, or even taking cocaine or other recreational drugs) is well-known to be associated with a heightened sense of confidence.
This doesn’t work forever (tolerance) and other people will experience the opposite effect with heightened anxiety.
If you want an example of why it’s not a blanket true statement or an easy solution for fear extinction, consider that stimulant use at excess dosages or abuse-pattern usage frequently ends in paranoia, where users are in such deep fear that they start sensing danger everywhere.
If one were to assume—which I recognize we certainly can't—that there was in fact some sort of causality here,
one interpretation would be that some specific drugs operate on relevant aspects of (or modulate the behavior of) the stipulated systems in a manner consistent with the desired outcome,
which allows for a neat summary in casual language, regardless of the complicated specific internal mechanisms.
I assume that some process also evaluate the memory patterns associated with a stimuli/concept and then adjust the signals emitted after exposure ?
I'm very very interested in this topic (I have some issues on that front) so if anyone knows books about neurology regarding trauma. Feel free to suggest me books or articles. Thanks
(The "brains are computers" analogy needs to die, but) it's a bit like saying "hard drive activity increases when a file is being secure-erased". Yes, but also, no.
Neurotransmitters are just "global variables" to the GPU. What the variable does or means is trained. Probably trained in the context of "I/O" signals. E.g. if the chemical also speeds up heart rate or breathing then that becomes part of the training data set.
So Dopamine can potentially "do" different things in different examples of the same animal, if environmental training data is sufficiently different.
> Neurotransmitters are just "global variables" to the GPU.
No, neurotransmitters are very local.
Dopamine exists all throughout your body, including your bloodstream. The dopamine in one location is uncoupled from the dopamine in another location. The dopamine in your bloodstream can't get into your brain. Dopamine within the brain doesn't spill over into entirely different regions of the brain.
You'll get a lot of pop-science answers when you ask about dopamine. The less popular truth is that focus and self-discipline can't be reduced to a single chemical. It's not as simple as a level in your brain that goes up and down.
Side note: ADHD is more than just dopamine, too. The stimulant medications used for ADHD have strong norepinephrine activity. There are non-stimulant ADHD medications that act on norepinephrine primarily. There are even studies where some non-dopaminergic ADHD medications outperform stimulants in certain measures like memory by modulating adrenergic circuits.
The unpopular take is that you need to realize that "dopamine" is an abstraction for higher level behaviors. It's not "dopamine" leading you to be distracted or focus, it's a behavior that you need to train and develop over time. There's also a big emotional regulation component where it helps to understand why you're seeking distractions instead of doing the work. Is it to provide comfort? Avoid uncomfortable feelings that the work brings up? Perfectionism? Are you trying to recharge during working hours because you're not recharging outside of work properly? There are many angles that need to be pursued.
I would recommend starting with small steps. Look up Screen Time settings or plugins that will limit your time spent on HN if that's a problem. Start with a generous setting and lower it over time. If you slip, start again the next time.
Treat it like something you train. Start small, make a deliberate effort, and work on getting better slowly. If you expect to flip a switch and turn into the most diligent coder you can imagine, you're unlikely to succeed. If you set a goal to do 10 more minutes of work and 10 fewer minutes of HN before lunch, that's doable. Little wins will compound.
1. Cold plunge - high but transient (last for hours). I do it in the morning, after my shower - start the day off right.
2. Exercise - short-term: increases dopamine, serotonin, and a bunch of other good stuff; long-term: increases dopamine receptor density.
3. Caffeine - while doesn't technically increase dopamine, it blocks adenosine receptors which indirectly increases dopamine signalling. But habitual use blunts the effect.
Other less acute things are: good sleep and lots of sunlight esp early in the day.
Cold plunge is good but keep in mind cold water immersion inhibits hypertrophy (but improves recovery time) depending on time since exercise, temperature and duration.
It's hard to focus on the here and now when the here and now is the soul-deadening sensory-less experience of sitting motionless staring at a flat rectangle of pixels.
Go out in the woods. Get your hands dirty. Meet friends at a bar and laugh until your stomach hurts.
It's so much easier to be present in the moment when the moment is actually high fidelity and nourishing.
I recently started doing a 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise, where you look around you and name 5 things you can see, touch and name 4 things you can touch, name 3 things you can hear, 2 you can smell, and 1 you can taste.
I was surprised how different it felt to consciously see and touch things. It's not like I'm walking around my house with my eyes closed normally, but most of the time things aren't really registering. Stopping to intentionally focus for a second on an actual object or a sound I'm currently hearing seems to sort of wake me up, bring me out of a trance a little. Not as well as digging in the garden, but not bad for a few seconds in the middle of the work day.
This was an interesting connection to me between meditation and neuroscience. Buddhists talk about the "monkey mind" that chatters incessantly. Well, that's the default mode network, part of your brain that is active when you're not engaged in a specific task, when you're thinking about self, others, past or future. A useful adaptation in our past environment for sure, but overactivity can be detrimental. The Buddhist solution is to mediate, to focus the attention on a singular thing and not be distracted by the chatter. That ability lives in the prefrontal cortex! It's able to override the DMN and it's something that can be trained by just exercising it.
Exercise for time with steady-state exertion has proven to be the ultimate focus supplement for me. Right afterward it is like a very powerful drug. If the exercise isn't at least 30 minutes, I don't feel anything. Somewhere around 38-45 minutes, the music begins to fade in.
My preferred steady state suffering machine is the Concept2 rower. I can keep an eye on stroke/min and cal/hr to stay within a very narrow band of exertion. HIIT and weightlifting are great too, but these are not as strenuous on the brain's "focus for time" circuitry. Lots of downtime and opportunities to get on the cellular device. A straight hour on the rower with the cruise control locked @ 850cal/hr is a totally different kind of animal.
You can try forming other habits in order to break the feedback loop. eg. define a good habit and repeat it. For example, at the start of the day immediately start working where you left the day before, then after lunch break you can check e-mail and read the news.
This may sound flippant, but one real option is to just quit doing so and not start again.
Maybe it's not obvious to you, but many of your real-world colleagues and role models don't visit HN or anything comparable. And they're still working at the desk next to you, and in the office you aspire to have some day. For all that stuff like this might feel justified or even necessary, it's not. And if you're finding that it introduces difficulties into your life or psyche, you are entitled to and capable of quitting altogether. You don't need to try to moderate it.
(And frankly, I personally don't even know what you're doing on GitHub so compulsively. I didn't even realize that was a thing, if that helps speak to how irrelevant it can be.)
Go see if you’re ADD/ADHD and get on meds (I recommend Dexedrine), then also “join” the neurospicey community spaces where people swap tips, learnings and observations.
Also always go for a walk, touch grass, hug a tree. Pleasant physical experiences are truly effective at getting you into the “here and now”.
It's weird that there's no mention of adrenaline (epinephrine) and noradrenaline (norepinephrine). Dopamine is only a precursor for a broader chemical reaction. All three - with dopamine - play crucial roles in our bodies' stress response system, and definitely with fear reactions. Dopamine is just a neurotransmitter.
> Dopamine is only a precursor for a broader chemical reaction.
No, dopamine is a signaling molecule that participates directly in this functionality.
You're right that it's just a neurotransmitter, but the relative pathways about how they're produced are irrelevant for this study. They looked at how dopamine binds to certain receptors in certain parts of the brain under certain conditions.
OK, maybe not "just a precursor" but still "just a neurotransmitter".
I've read "The Molecule of More" and as much reasonably looking material I could find on the subject to "understand" my ADHD and fight it w/o meds. And I still feel dumb. Could you please explain how dopamine "participates directly in this functionality"?
I gotta say that since doing beta blocker enhanced therapy I've basically wrapped up any emotional response to past trauma and can examine all that stuff fully without having to protect myself. Pretty great stuff.
I don't know why more attention here is not put in appreciating the headline. What a brilliant, insightful line. Simple. Abstract enough to apply to many things that you experienced just begging to be synthesized, but haven't.
Makes sense, as Parkinson patients, freeze or tremble, which are both fear responses. I have seen my mother die of Parkinsons. I see a static (permanent) fear response as the straightforward cause for Parkinsons (combined with a helpful personality, which makes it difficult to just snap out of it).
On the other end there were people close by that having seen war, took a life lesson from their fear response: you survive by being alert and by distrusting. They radiated a permanent state of alarm, as the enemy may come when you least expect it.
If I remember correctly it is not at all related to fear but a disfunction in the basal ganglia (which performs action selection). Think of it as more like an inability to select an action or to select just one from a range of related movements (not at the conscious level, but between the conscious decision making and the signals being fired down your spine).
No, the pathology of Parkinson's Disease is dopaminergic dysfunction (the symptoms coming from this happening in the area relevant to planning movements, separate from areas that influence emotion or reward), usually driven by loss of dopamine-producing neurons. This is well-described by decades of research and tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers.
This is a really cool study—finally shows that dopamine isn’t just about reward but actually acts as the “all-clear” signal that lets the brain unlearn fear. By watching dopamine neurons light up when an expected shock doesn’t happen, and then using light to tweak that pathway, they prove dopamine release in the amygdala actively drives extinction rather than just tagging along. It’s exciting because it hints at new ways to boost therapies for PTSD and anxiety by tweaking that VTA→BLA circuit or D1 receptors
What’s interesting here is that in the drug treatment world it’s basically known that drug abuse is almost always a reaction to some kind of psychological trauma or disorder, and an awful lot of drugs (not just cocaine) play heavily with the dopamine pathways. The idea of dopamine as your brain’s signal that you’re safe fits about as neatly with that as can be.
(Of course, like everything in biology, dopamine also does about a gazillion other things, too, so it’s not quite that cut and dry, but it rhymes, at least.)
> in the drug treatment world it’s basically known that drug abuse is almost always a reaction to some kind of psychological trauma or disorder,
This is not true in the professional world. People engage in drug use for many reasons, including pure recreation.
Trauma can precede relapses or bouts of drug abuse, but it's not a universal explanation.
There are a lot of pop-culture ideas that explain everything away as trauma. These are popular on podcasts, Reddit, and other social media websites. There are also types of therapists who learned to treat trauma and then try to apply that to everything. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". These therapists will try to reframe everything as trauma because it's what they know how to teach.
They often reverse engineer a traumatic backstory as an explanation even when one doesn't exist. You can find podcasters and therapists who will even claim that being born imparts permanent trauma that explains things long into adulthood. There's no evidence behind this claim, but it's convenient for therapists who need to find a traumatic backstory before they can address something because everyone was born at some point.
> The idea of dopamine as your brain’s signal that you’re safe fits about as neatly with that as can be.
That idea is completely wrong, though.
The study is talking about dopamine signaling in one specific location of the brain.
Dopamine is used in other locations in the brain to encode aversive stimuli, among other things.
Dopamine (and other neurotransmitters) don't just do one single thing in the brain. They have diverse effects all over.
Also, many of the drugs that people associated with dopamine actually have much broader effects, such as on norepinephrine (stimulants) and serotonin (cocaine).
There are dopamine agonist drugs that go in and very precisely target different dopamine receptors in the brain, activating them directly. Many people are surprised to learn that a common side effect of these drugs is an irresistible urge to sleep when first taking them, for example.
> in the drug treatment world it’s basically known that drug abuse is almost always a reaction to some kind of psychological trauma or disorder
This is incorrect. While this is true for a substantial number of people, I want to offer some resistance to the pop-psychology axiom that "everything is because of trauma." Not only is is unsupported by science, it has lead to an expansion of the definition of the word "trauma" in popular culture that's so broad as to be nearly useless clinically or scientifically.
I had the unique experience as a youth in attending a school where a substantial portion of the school was funneled there by one of the many 1970s and 1980s troubled teen corporations that spun out of Synanon after it collapsed. This one specialized in drug addicts.
Almost all of my classmates (not me, unfortunately) were from exceptionally wealthy families and excepting one none of them ever mentioned any childhood trauma. Instead they were precocious partiers who got into drugs despite being underage and going to the nightclubs in the seedy part of town - no one at the time was turning away hot young women or gay(for pay or real) young men. And the club scene was a drug scene. It still is.
I don’t think trauma is actually at the root of almost all drug abusers. The only first class abusers (pot and alcohol in serious quantities daily) that I know at the moment grew up in perfectly fine suburban families and are in good, non-narcissistic/controlling/etc relationships with their families. They’re just addicts who can’t stop. One of them is going to die from it, eventually, given his level of alcohol consumption.
Indeed, I was surprised both at the fact that it literally makes me feel better because the drug makes you feel good but also that it calmed my brain down and let me access some inner peace. But also the focus modification is big and I learned so many good habits that now I need much less of it to get stuff done. I wake up and start doing my chores before I even have my first dose!
Generic Adderall Gang here, and in hindsight, I'm surprised at how little of it I need to realize a much better headspace. Makes me wonder if all of that caffeine in my undiagnosed youth was saying something...
This could explain the link between why so many with ADHD also tend to have anxiety, since ADHD could roughly be considered a lack of dopamine (I know it's more complex than that, but it is a significant portion of it).
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The correct way to interpret this study is that dopamine is part of the signaling chain involved in fear extinction. The specific details of where, how, and when that dopamine moves through the brain are important.
The wrong way to interpret these studies is to think of dopamine as a "level" within the brain that goes up and down. Resist the urge to assume that taking a dopamine-modulating drug will result in this specific outcome.
Dopamine response within the brain is very complicated and region dependent. When encoding aversive stimuli (things you learn to avoid) there is evidence that dopamine signaling decreases in some brain areas while it increases in others: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462... That's just the tip of the iceberg. Don't fall for the trap of thinking that dopamine does just one or two things in the brain.
I wonder what even the point is.
Not to be completely dismissive, placebo/mysticism/whatever can work
and,
I can say that my own experience is that correlating my own exposure to stimuli I have found fear-inducing, while on dopamine-modulating drugs,
has proven highly efficacious in overcoming those fears.
No A/B, results may vary, etc.,
but personally I have had life-changing results.
This doesn’t work forever (tolerance) and other people will experience the opposite effect with heightened anxiety.
If you want an example of why it’s not a blanket true statement or an easy solution for fear extinction, consider that stimulant use at excess dosages or abuse-pattern usage frequently ends in paranoia, where users are in such deep fear that they start sensing danger everywhere.
one interpretation would be that some specific drugs operate on relevant aspects of (or modulate the behavior of) the stipulated systems in a manner consistent with the desired outcome,
which allows for a neat summary in casual language, regardless of the complicated specific internal mechanisms.
I'm very very interested in this topic (I have some issues on that front) so if anyone knows books about neurology regarding trauma. Feel free to suggest me books or articles. Thanks
Dead Comment
No, neurotransmitters are very local.
Dopamine exists all throughout your body, including your bloodstream. The dopamine in one location is uncoupled from the dopamine in another location. The dopamine in your bloodstream can't get into your brain. Dopamine within the brain doesn't spill over into entirely different regions of the brain.
Side note: ADHD is more than just dopamine, too. The stimulant medications used for ADHD have strong norepinephrine activity. There are non-stimulant ADHD medications that act on norepinephrine primarily. There are even studies where some non-dopaminergic ADHD medications outperform stimulants in certain measures like memory by modulating adrenergic circuits.
The unpopular take is that you need to realize that "dopamine" is an abstraction for higher level behaviors. It's not "dopamine" leading you to be distracted or focus, it's a behavior that you need to train and develop over time. There's also a big emotional regulation component where it helps to understand why you're seeking distractions instead of doing the work. Is it to provide comfort? Avoid uncomfortable feelings that the work brings up? Perfectionism? Are you trying to recharge during working hours because you're not recharging outside of work properly? There are many angles that need to be pursued.
I would recommend starting with small steps. Look up Screen Time settings or plugins that will limit your time spent on HN if that's a problem. Start with a generous setting and lower it over time. If you slip, start again the next time.
Treat it like something you train. Start small, make a deliberate effort, and work on getting better slowly. If you expect to flip a switch and turn into the most diligent coder you can imagine, you're unlikely to succeed. If you set a goal to do 10 more minutes of work and 10 fewer minutes of HN before lunch, that's doable. Little wins will compound.
"all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".
Like with any complex system, there are a lot of ways for the system to fail, and the number of states considered "working properly" is much smaller.
2. Exercise - short-term: increases dopamine, serotonin, and a bunch of other good stuff; long-term: increases dopamine receptor density.
3. Caffeine - while doesn't technically increase dopamine, it blocks adenosine receptors which indirectly increases dopamine signalling. But habitual use blunts the effect.
Other less acute things are: good sleep and lots of sunlight esp early in the day.
It's hard to focus on the here and now when the here and now is the soul-deadening sensory-less experience of sitting motionless staring at a flat rectangle of pixels.
Go out in the woods. Get your hands dirty. Meet friends at a bar and laugh until your stomach hurts.
It's so much easier to be present in the moment when the moment is actually high fidelity and nourishing.
I was surprised how different it felt to consciously see and touch things. It's not like I'm walking around my house with my eyes closed normally, but most of the time things aren't really registering. Stopping to intentionally focus for a second on an actual object or a sound I'm currently hearing seems to sort of wake me up, bring me out of a trance a little. Not as well as digging in the garden, but not bad for a few seconds in the middle of the work day.
Outside, right now, people stay on screens all the time. It's the same stuff. Why even bother?
Humans plan ahead. We look towards the future and the past. Not all the time, but a lot of the time.
This carpe diem stuff doesn't seem like the right way to approach the problem given our current technological society.
Also, I'm not gonna party just because someone told me to.
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Don't do highly dopaminergic activities like using electronic devices that provide entertainment or communications
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My preferred steady state suffering machine is the Concept2 rower. I can keep an eye on stroke/min and cal/hr to stay within a very narrow band of exertion. HIIT and weightlifting are great too, but these are not as strenuous on the brain's "focus for time" circuitry. Lots of downtime and opportunities to get on the cellular device. A straight hour on the rower with the cruise control locked @ 850cal/hr is a totally different kind of animal.
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Make an electroshock gizmo that hits you when your browser visits certain domains?
But just because they are the best doesn’t mean their help actually helps.
Maybe it's not obvious to you, but many of your real-world colleagues and role models don't visit HN or anything comparable. And they're still working at the desk next to you, and in the office you aspire to have some day. For all that stuff like this might feel justified or even necessary, it's not. And if you're finding that it introduces difficulties into your life or psyche, you are entitled to and capable of quitting altogether. You don't need to try to moderate it.
(And frankly, I personally don't even know what you're doing on GitHub so compulsively. I didn't even realize that was a thing, if that helps speak to how irrelevant it can be.)
Advice: love stress. Enjoy it. Feel it. Just don’t ask for it.
Also always go for a walk, touch grass, hug a tree. Pleasant physical experiences are truly effective at getting you into the “here and now”.
No, dopamine is a signaling molecule that participates directly in this functionality.
You're right that it's just a neurotransmitter, but the relative pathways about how they're produced are irrelevant for this study. They looked at how dopamine binds to certain receptors in certain parts of the brain under certain conditions.
I've read "The Molecule of More" and as much reasonably looking material I could find on the subject to "understand" my ADHD and fight it w/o meds. And I still feel dumb. Could you please explain how dopamine "participates directly in this functionality"?
On the other end there were people close by that having seen war, took a life lesson from their fear response: you survive by being alert and by distrusting. They radiated a permanent state of alarm, as the enemy may come when you least expect it.
Seriously though as someone who suffers from extreme anxiety I am eternally grateful for this kind of work.
I would really like to see this combined with brain stimulation.
(Of course, like everything in biology, dopamine also does about a gazillion other things, too, so it’s not quite that cut and dry, but it rhymes, at least.)
This is not true in the professional world. People engage in drug use for many reasons, including pure recreation.
Trauma can precede relapses or bouts of drug abuse, but it's not a universal explanation.
There are a lot of pop-culture ideas that explain everything away as trauma. These are popular on podcasts, Reddit, and other social media websites. There are also types of therapists who learned to treat trauma and then try to apply that to everything. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". These therapists will try to reframe everything as trauma because it's what they know how to teach.
They often reverse engineer a traumatic backstory as an explanation even when one doesn't exist. You can find podcasters and therapists who will even claim that being born imparts permanent trauma that explains things long into adulthood. There's no evidence behind this claim, but it's convenient for therapists who need to find a traumatic backstory before they can address something because everyone was born at some point.
> The idea of dopamine as your brain’s signal that you’re safe fits about as neatly with that as can be.
That idea is completely wrong, though.
The study is talking about dopamine signaling in one specific location of the brain.
Dopamine is used in other locations in the brain to encode aversive stimuli, among other things.
Dopamine (and other neurotransmitters) don't just do one single thing in the brain. They have diverse effects all over.
Also, many of the drugs that people associated with dopamine actually have much broader effects, such as on norepinephrine (stimulants) and serotonin (cocaine).
There are dopamine agonist drugs that go in and very precisely target different dopamine receptors in the brain, activating them directly. Many people are surprised to learn that a common side effect of these drugs is an irresistible urge to sleep when first taking them, for example.
This is incorrect. While this is true for a substantial number of people, I want to offer some resistance to the pop-psychology axiom that "everything is because of trauma." Not only is is unsupported by science, it has lead to an expansion of the definition of the word "trauma" in popular culture that's so broad as to be nearly useless clinically or scientifically.
Almost all of my classmates (not me, unfortunately) were from exceptionally wealthy families and excepting one none of them ever mentioned any childhood trauma. Instead they were precocious partiers who got into drugs despite being underage and going to the nightclubs in the seedy part of town - no one at the time was turning away hot young women or gay(for pay or real) young men. And the club scene was a drug scene. It still is.
I don’t think trauma is actually at the root of almost all drug abusers. The only first class abusers (pot and alcohol in serious quantities daily) that I know at the moment grew up in perfectly fine suburban families and are in good, non-narcissistic/controlling/etc relationships with their families. They’re just addicts who can’t stop. One of them is going to die from it, eventually, given his level of alcohol consumption.
I am distracted from work by anxiety. With medication, I'm not distracted.