Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine | Hacker News Reader

Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine

wsj.com

26 pointspavanyara6 comments

"No, Dopamine Is Not Addictive" written by a clinical psychologist in 2017. When articles like this come up, it make me wonder how much of psychiatry isn't as robust as I initially thought.

I have taken a few advanced courses in psych and I was also taught that most neuro transmitters work as regulators and signals to release other things. People with too much dopamine become schizophrenic, and it's not tied directly to binging behavior. Dopamine blocking agents are used to treat schizophrenia.

Dopamine reward pathways also generally are talked in the context of adhd and impulse control. Which is an issue before the actual addiction. I personally also don't like the word addiction being used in such a casual way. Addiction is a clinical term and generally assumes severe negative consequences on one's health and a severe compulsion to go back. The patient was being affected negatively but if it was as simple as the author describes to quit, I don't think that would meet the standard for clinical addiction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23747880

From my layperson's understanding, dopamine isn't the reward neurotransmitter, it's the neurotransmitter associated with 'seeking' activities ('fight/forage/etc') and when you actually get the reward the dopamine levels drop.

So your dopamine levels being high can compel you to seek things on the internet, but in the absence of the internet you'd still have those dopamine levels and just be acting on them in different ways. Perhaps fighting! It's interesting that as more people get online violent crime rates have dropped significantly.

My understanding is that it's pretty complicated and is associated/released with craving/seeking, anticipation, as well as reward.

Oh I'm definitely oversimplifying, and I think we're generally saying the same thing. My only point of clarification is that getting the reward causes dopamine levels to decrease. Dopamine isn't the reward, it's what makes you chase the reward.

I could be wrong, but I think the moment of reward (among other things) actually also does cause certain kinds of neurons to release dopamine and then adjust their configuration depending on the relationship between the prediction and the reward, novelty, intensity, and other factors.

I believe both the "chase" and the "getting" release dopamine; or, at least, different sets of dopaminergic neurons will adjust their firing rates, spike thresholds, and other things based on chasing, reward, and more.

This dopamine neuron research by DeepMind is pretty interesting: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Dopamine-and-temporal-diff...

Dopamine itself probably isn't the most important component; the complex inner and interconnected workings of dopamine neurons may be the crucial bit. Dopamine is just one way for them to talk to one another and get them to adjust (or not adjust) what they're doing. It's only one particular form of message-passing; dopamine neurons can also directly send electrical signals to one another.

Maybe kind of like an alien species trying to understand Earth's digital machines and deciding photons are the most important unit of functioning because they observe photons rushing back and forth through fiber optic cables and notice the timing and transmission frequency of the photons are closely correlated to the behavior of the systems. In some sense this is true, but in another sense it's a very superficial view.

And this analogy definitely isn't remotely close to accurate, but maybe there could be something going on where electricity is like a "link layer" and dopamine is like an additional transport and/or session and/or application layer. Or perhaps not that, but another surely inaccurate analogy is that perhaps it's a separate communication channel entirely, like a router's ethernet port for data vs. its console port for management.

(Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken about any of this. I am definitely not an expert and a lot of this could possibly be bullshit and the analogies are purely silly, contrived, speculative hypotheticals.)

Cool another pop article placing undue value on a single neurotransmitter out of many in an inordinately complex system such as the brain. Junk.

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