Please stop calling dopamine an addictive rewarding neurochemical (2017)

Not to mention that this pop science article does plenty of essentializing on its own...

Particularly when it laughs off the entire concept of individuals feeling their own dopamine levels before describing a series of commonly prescribed drugs to inhibit or encourage it... The author can't imagine people noticing the effects of their own psychs?

Dopamine, dopamine rush, etc are incredibly useful concepts that previously didn't exist in the English language. As you describe it's a useful mental model to explain your own and other's behavior, and as the person quoted in the article describes a so called dopamine rush is a palpable feeling.

The fact that the concept "dopamine" shares a name with a neurotransmitter is imho not that relevant and will over time just turn into an etymological curiosity. It would be better if it was named less confusingly, but that's not how language works.

> So in essence, all this article is doing is complaining about pop science and how we often reduce complex behaviours to singular explanations.

Not a neuroscientist - but I think what irks me about the common pop-science explanations is that they use those terms to establish a boundary between desirable and undesirable behaviours - but do so in a way that feels sort of arbitrary and dishonest.

I think when describing desirable behaviours or activities, we tend to use a more "cognitive" vocabulary that emphasizes a person as a thinking individual, capable of freely making decisions: Thoughts, feelings, memories, motivations, the self, etc.

Whereas when describing unwanted or unhealthy behaviours, we use biological or neurological vocabulary: Hormones, neurotransmitters, neural pathways, dopamine, opioids, the brain etc. [1]

This can create an impression as if those two sets of concepts belonged to completely separate worlds - where one is strongly associated with desirable effects and the other with undesirable ones. This seems very odd as both are simply different perspectives on the same thing after all.

It's sort of as if some highly nontechnical person was really fond of their car - as a magical device that lets them travel quickly and impress others - but believed we'd all be better off without batteries, fuel pumps or catalytic converters as those seem to cause nothing but trouble.

[1] The two big exceptions I can think of are advertising (where unhealthy behaviours are described using the cognitive vocabulary) and research on animals (where any kind of animal behaviour is described using the biological vocabulary).

The author addresses that in the last two paragraphs:

> Why does this matter? Can’t this just be chalked up to lack of media sophistication, and pop psychology misunderstanding the nuance? In fact, when people such as Simon Sinek, the author and consultant whose viral video blames dopamine for millennial's problems bring up neuroscience, they are using a clever strategy to manipulate us. Mr. Sinek is not a neuroscientist, and has not studied or researched the complexity of this aspect of our brain. But, he knows something you don’t: mentioning neuroscience is a great way to convince people you are more knowledgeable about something, and to make your arguments more convincing. This effect was recently demonstrated by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, who showed that use of irrelevant references to brain science was an effective way to lure people into thinking that complex phenomena are simple, and easily explained by, well, the brain.

> People’s problems are never simple. And when a person does a thing over and over, even when the behavior is causing problems, there are a great many complex reasons behind that behavior. When we offer the reductively simple answer of “because dopamine,” it distracts us from the person. It is the person who learns, and dopamine is merely a factor, one factor among many, in the learning. When we encourage people who are watching too much porn, using the cell phone while driving, or looking at Facebook every two minutes, to blame their problems on dopamine, we teach them to externalize the problem, and blame it on dopamine. Instead, if we focus on the learning, and the salience aspects of these process, it helps us to draw people’s attention back to their own behaviors, their own motivations, and the meaning that they (and their religious or social background) have given to this behavior or experience. It helps us to put people back in the driver’s seat of their life. So please, let’s start talking about people, rather than irrelevant neurochemicals.

> So in essence, all this article is doing is complaining about pop science and how we often reduce complex behaviours to singular explanations. But isn’t that just a part of being human?

You may be confusing theory with practical considerations.

Human beings desire to know the truth, at least by nature. What you're describing is an inaccurate, even false belief that happens to make it easier to cope with something by making something an easy scapegoat. It allows you to blame something perceived as external and impersonal which allows you to put some distance between you and the urge.

There's nothing special about calling this thing "dopamine". Classically, the passions are bodily urges that could be out of whack in some way (either excessive or insufficient or inappropriate), often through habituation or lack thereof, but possibly also made more likely through temperament. Failing to satisfy an excessive or inappropriate urge won't kill you (satisfaction might), and knowing that already grants you power over it because its urgency is now seen as a kind of bluff.

> Perhaps it is human nature to try to solve complex issues by reducing the problem to something that can be explained to a lay person, even if such explanations are incorrect.

Reductionism destroys the truth by eliminating everything it cannot explain and by representing what remains in terms of some desired language. It is a rationalization through preconception rather than explanation.

How does the incorrect way of thinking about dopamine help you as a gambling addict?

I can imagine that remembering that your brain chemistry is part of what causes the compulsion is helpful because it takes some pressure off seeing the addiction as a character flaw.

But beyond just being a synonym for ‘brain chemistry’, can you say what the concept of ‘dopamine’ is doing for you?

> pinpointing a neurological mechanism for a problem amounts to externalizing the problem

I read it as "pinpointing a simpler reason to explain an often more complicated problem". It's easier to say "it's a dopamine rush" than "I'm on Facebook all day because I'm an insecure person and it's makes me feel bad and I don't know what else to do about it" (to mention a non-personal example).

An addiction has for sure its chemical reasons, but limiting to only that when dealing with it, it's reductive (my wife is a Psycologist and I heard arguments like these many times already....).

No what the author is simply describing is that some mechanical process in the brain should not be taken as causative for some process at the level of behavior.

All behavioral processes manifest biochemically in the brain, regardless of the complexity of the cause. It would be magical if it didn't. If the local lead company pours lead into the drinking water every single affected person has extreme levels of lead in the brain. Yet, the correct conclusion is not to blame 'lead-brains' but the ultimate cause of the pollution.

The same thing is true for dopamine and Facebook. Even if the entire explanation was as simple as 'dopamine turns you into a facebook zombie', dopamine is not actual root cause at the level of behavior (that would be the incentive design of the social platform), dopamine is just a proximate agent.

people who buy into these simplistic explanations are actually the ones who engage in a body / mind fallacy. Anything that impacts behavior, regardless of how remote in nature, manifests in the brain, precisely because you are your brain, not despite of it.

The issue is, and the reason I submitted this article is dopamine is being grossly misrepresented as the tangible enjoyable feeling from an activity ex: "dopamine squirt" in so many articles these days.

Since this article we're commenting on is from 2017, I think that the article you're linking (which hit the front page) is the reason this is posted.

was searching for this comment

Exactly. It's a shorthand/ synecdoche to be used instead of rehashing the whole underlying discussion every single time.

> vasopressor in hypertensive patients

I think you meant hypotensive.

Case in point:

> Dopamine is connected to rewarding experiences, but not in that it makes you feel good. On Twitter recently, a man challenged me saying that pornography “gives me a palpable dopamine rush after he abstains for a few days.” I replied that this was fascinating, and he must be a thoroughly unique and superhuman person, to be able to detect and discriminate the experience of different neurochemicals.

It is OK to use different words for different kinds of positive feelings. What people call pleasurable and what they call dopamine hit are to large extend quote different experiences. There is some overlap, but that is it.

We can call everything pleasurable, but then out language will loose expressivity people apparently want.

The problem with talking about behaviors’ physical substrate is that we can’t talk about cause/effect across the physical and social realms. Neurotransmitters don’t have causal effects on the “mind” any more than the wake of a ship has causal effects on its plotted course. Sure, dopamine levels change in response to addictive behavior, but they don’t cause it, and talking about causes in this realm is probably not as helpful or expedient as talking about cause I’d the personal/social realm. Reducing behaviors to neurotransmitters discards all the more complicated things we do during addiction like experiencing shame, changing lifestyle, eating, or sleeping habits, or even the higher level frameworks through which we rationalize and put value on things in the world.

Case in point: how can we possibly describe quitting cold turkey in a chemical framework? People do it all the time, yet it seems to be more of an act of moral courage than of basic, biologically driven behavior.

An insidious side effect of brain chemical teleology is that it victimizes us in an unnecessarily deterministic manner. “You can hardly help yourself, see, your brain is literally working against you by producing evil chemicals in insufficient/inappropriate quantities. Take $x mi drug to correct yourself!”

Instead of simplified and erroneous medical speak we might as well talk of the cold-turkey-quitter as having cast off a demon from their soul. At least in that framework the individual retains agency.

Addiction is present when endogenous forms of neurotransmitters are downregulated in response to sustained external supply. As such, the receptor regulation systems do not see a 'need' to self regulate and upon cessation of said 'sustained external supply' psychosomatic factors drive motivation (VTA theory). Having said that, there are chemically mediated addictions and psychosomatic addictions (the two are not mutually exclusive).