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Comment by eurasiantiger | Hacker News Reader

> When we're exposed to a rewarding stimulus, the brain responds by releasing dopamine – which is why it's often called the "reward" chemical.

This is incorrect. Dopamine is not released as a response to a positive stimulus, it is released in anticipation of a positive stimulus.

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You are also incorrect. It's both. For instance upon experiencing a novel, pleasurable experience, one you didn't know to anticipate, dopamine levels will increase above baseline. It will then drop below tonic levels before returning to the baseline, creating mild, even unnoticeable discomfort, driving longer term desire / motion to find / anticipation for more of the thing in the future.

That’s not wrong, but it ignores the effects of catecholamine metabolism and the co-storage of dopamine and noradrenaline in the same vesicles. Noradrenaline release necessarily causes dopamine release, but also an increase in the activity of dopamine beta-hydroxylase, which starts converting more dopamine into noradrenaline — hence the drop below baseline, discomfort and drive.

Yes. The over-simplification of dopamine as some sort of pleasure chemical is frustratingly common.

Everyone seems to want to be able to explain every emotion and behavior as the byproduct of a neurotransmitter, e.g. "I'm addicted to the dopamine hits from my phone", "I'm sad because my serotonin is low", "I'm on an endorphin high from that workout", etc. etc.

Besides many of these examples being flat-out wrong, emotions in general are immensely more complex than the simple release of a single chemical in the brain. The belief that everything bad in the brain is just a "chemical imbalance" is a really harmful one IMO, as it turns people away from truly understanding their problems, and replaces any sort of deeper understanding with a desire to simplify everything down to pseudo-scientific brain chemistry quick fixes.

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