Sex, drugs, dopamine and exceeding expectations | Hacker News Reader

Sex, drugs, dopamine and exceeding expectations

thenextweb.com

24 pointszeedotme7 comments

"It isn’t just a feeling but your brain releasing dopamine"

Is there actually any difference between the two? Emotions are extremely chemical things, after all.

I think the difference is that neurochemicals can alter your mental state, which affects other feelings and decisions. But being happy about getting a problem resolved doesn't "leak" in the same way.

Most theories today posit that dopamine encodes the positive predictive error between a true reward and an expected reward. So if the reward is much more than you expect lots of dopamine will be released, but if it is exactly what you expected then none will be released. Dopamine enhances the experience of the reward by lowering the rate of firing required in the reward area to experience the same reward in the absence of dopamine. Thus, lesser rewards feel better when there is differential expectation. So dopamine enhances the feeling that's already there.

The author used the word, "sticked" to describe customers sticking with a car salesman. What chemical gets released in your brain when you're underwhelmed by the copy writing?

When I read that sentence, I felt like I did the last time I ran out of sex.

I think I practice this - I call it managing expectations. Microsoft does it with their call support, as well, albeit rather more in your face (an email sent shortly after first contract describing what they are going to set my expectations to - And we did not discuss it):

"As discussed, I am providing you a copy of our scope agreement for your issue.

Issue Definition: Users unable to login to xp workstations intermittently

Scope Agreement: Once we make sure that users are able to login to XP workstations the issue would be considered resolved"

But I find assisting clients with expectations, positive or negative, has great benefits for long term relationships. They learn that I am not just feeding them a line.

I tend to under-promise, and I warn clients when they get too exuberant after small initial success in a larger problem. I consider it Murphy, rather than cynicism/pessimism.

To be fair, not all drugs release dopamine but those that are addictive do. In a sense, the salesmen had his customers addicted to an experience of buying from him. In another sense, Apple has the customers addicted to experience of buying and using their technology.

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