Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten
picower.mit.edu
picower.mit.edu
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.
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.
It’s unfortunate that so many podcasters have leaned into the myths about being able to manipulate dopamine as some global up/down thing you can adjust by following certain protocols.
Andrew Huberman is among the worst at this because he has enough education that he should know better. I think he’s too enamored with the traffic and clicks he gets when he talks about dopamine, so he’s willing to stretch the truth or even break it completely if it will make for engaging podcast content.
Some of the studies he cites over and over again about dopamine don’t even say what he claims. Huberman is a joke among people who actually know the science, but he became a hero to people who thought he was just a nice guy sharing free knowledge with them.
I wonder what even the point is.
I wonder what even the point is.
Not to be completely dismissive, placebo/mysticism/whatever can work
>Not to be completely dismissive
A whole series of essays based on the above, dismissing <deep learning>, <venture capital>, <LLM>, <blockchain>, <compute-based consumer platforms>,
Remains to be written!
dopaminergic take: who doesn't want to take on journeys of discovery fuelled by other people's (even entire GDPs-worth of?) time and money :)?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Also personally, it doesn’t even help me with focus, in part because administering it is too distracting. I wonder whether there’s a place for an extended release nicotine pill, although that would probably be pretty rough on the gut.
One other “light” supplement that can dampen addictive behaviors or cravings is l-theanine.
Don't do highly dopaminergic activities like using electronic devices that provide entertainment or communications
But just because they are the best doesn’t mean their help actually helps.
If you want to get rid of an addiction, stay away from addicts and everything they produce. Stay away from their artistic creations, stay away from their complicated explanations of the world, and stay away from their gossip. Also, please don't study to become any kind of "drug counselor," get regular person jobs and normal hobbies. You're dying of romance, and you need to figure out how to love the world as it is.
I guess you can think of this as my retirement from Hacker News. Thank you kind stranger.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
Suffice to say parent is correct, and you are not.
Sounds like planning ahead. Exactly like I said.
> literally everybody
It lacks a further explanation. I don't know if you see that if you can't put it in your own words.
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.
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.
Make an electroshock gizmo that hits you when your browser visits certain domains?
tyrosine -> dopamine -> (beta-hydroxylase) -> noradrenaline -> Phenylethanolamine N-methyltransferase > adrenalineNo, 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"?
There are receptors specifically for dopamine on the amygdala neurons. Dopamine molecules are released by the pre-synaptic neurons, travel across the synapse, and bind to these receptors.
Dopamine’s role in the nervous system is not simply an intermediate on the pathway to produce epinephrine or norepinephrine. If you thought like this you’d reach the conclusion that testosterone is simply a precursor to estrogen because the pathway to convert it exists in some tissues of the body.
The way that I’ve learned to think about it is that the brain is made up neurons, and they perform specific functions, technically individually but more usefully understood in regional groupings (primarily figured out via fMRI/blood flow studies and lesion experiments).
Each neuron’s activity is regulated by specific neurotransmitters, and the type of receptors expressed in neurons also correlates with these functional areas (figured out through PET/radio-tagged molecule scans and biopsies). Regarding dopamine specifically, the area that is responsible for effortful attention (prefrontal cortex) as well as for reward (in a general sense, broader “good” not only simpler treats) processing (nucleus accumbens) have high concentrations of dopamine receptors.
Therefore, drugs that interact with dopamine receptors or with chemical chains that involve dopamine can affect these functions.
Neurotransmitters are just chemicals and they go through many complex and interrelated metabolic chains, and at baseline (in a typical individual, barring specific genetic differences) it is often most useful to assume they’re all there and instead understand where they’re used.
This comment might not be the most succinct and I’m just started my education on the subject so I’m sure there are inaccuracy’s and I’d be happy if they’re pointed out, but I do hope that it helps you get a somewhat clearer picture and realize that you’re not dumb for being confused about this.
Understandable writing, easily digestible and - for me - thought-provoking. Thanks!
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 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.
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 not true in the professional world. People engage in drug use for many reasons, including pure recreation.
Drug use != drug abuse
I am distracted from work by anxiety. With medication, I'm not distracted.
The problem with amphetamine is you pay for every benefit: focus now, lethargy later; energy now, anhedonia later.
But taking a small, consistent dose. Does that work? Do you feel you net benefits in life from taking the drug, discounting for withdrawal and/or tolerance?
> But taking a small, consistent dose. Does that work? Do you feel you net benefits in life from taking the drug, discounting for withdrawal and/or tolerance?
There's a reason these medications are supposed to be taken regularly at the same dose in clinical practice. Patients should not be going through cycles of taking stimulants and then withdrawing all of the time.
There's a disconnect between the way some people try to use stimulants ad-hoc versus the therapeutic modality. The initial burst of confidence, energy, and positive mood that comes from intermittent use is a side effect, but people confuse it with a primary effect. They can get into cycles of chasing it with dose escalations or taking it on random days while they exist below baseline on others. This isn't a winnable battle over time because the brain will adapt, not to mention all of those off-days start to add up and people around them notice the extremely inconsistent mood and performance.
Unfortunately, misinformation about ADHD is all over the internet. I recommend ignoring basically anything that comes out of Reddit, Twitter, or TikTok because it's really that bad. Take medications as directed and set yourself up for some stability. Resist the urge to play with doses, take excess doses on some days, or try to play tolerance games. These never work in the long term.
There's a simple heuristic: When you reach stability, you shouldn't really feel the medication. It should be background noise. There's a reason why young people who have been properly titrated on stimulant medications don't understand what the big deal is with their peers taking large doses (without tolerance) and then speeding around for a while. It's where the myth about ADHD people reacting differently to stimulants comes from. Proper treatment will settle to equilibrium and shouldn't produce overt feelings of being drugged or hyperfocused.
With XR, I feel less hyperfocus and more sleepytime disruptions. It's less strong so I take more, but it lasts longer so I get its effects when I don't need it.
I feel like IR is actually less amenable to abuse.
Theres a host of physical symptoms that come with it to that are not fun to manage: decreased appetite, dehydration, headaches, sleep loss, heart palpatstions.
I would say its far better to take it on a needed basis once in a while
I imagine the tolerance thing holds with all drugs so Im surprised people say it works for them long term (maybe placebo, or they're comparing it to withdrawal "Ive been on adderall for 10 years, if I go a day without it I feel like shit and cant function, so it works!" but maybe...
For the first few days we can experience significantly increased energy and some euphoria, along with the therapeutic effects. That's a really novel experience at first (which in itself helps ADHD brains focus) so it often works extremely well for a short while.
People get in trouble if they try to chase that initial feeling (high), mistaking it for the therapeutic value that the medication is supposed to provide. Eventually we're not supposed to feel it at all, and if it's the right medication for us at the right dosage, it should just quietly provide therapeutic value in the background, improving our executive functioning challenges, emotional regulation, etc.
As I understand it, the data on tolerance with stimulant medication is a bit mixed[1], some people develop tolerance but many people don't.
In your situation I'd definitely give different medications a try, it shouldn't make you feel like a zombie. It's pretty common for people to respond poorly one class of medications and respond well to another class. If Concerta (methylphenidate) didn't work for me I would personally consider Elvanse (lisdexamfetamine), then atomoxetine (an SNRI). There are also some other non-stimulant options like guanfacine and a few antidepressants that have been found to work well for ADHD but I don't know much about those.
After a while though Im not quite certain what the residual effects were. Maybe slightly more focus, but I still couldn't focus on my work, side projects, hobbies and any increased focus there was went to video games and bad habits.
Perhaps issue is Im beyond bored of my job that nothing can save it and need to make an active effort to be disciplined
IMO, that's always just been me. Now vs Later is hard to judge, though, because I tend to have "good focus" blocks of time, and "chill blocks". Exact timing depends on my overall weekly schedule leading up to a time period.
Also, I mentally classify different types of energy. Physical, social, and mental energies all have their different places in a day.
> small, consistent dose
For me, yeah, but YMMV based on brain chemistry and environmental variables. Since I use El Cheapo, I max out at 10mg 2x/day, but rarely adhere to that unless I'm planning ahead for it/have been on that roll for a while. This helps a lot with tolerance, especially when I have lazy weekends.
And from a personal perspective: It's a very simple drug to understand, which makes me feel at ease. Brain goes vroom, like an engine hitting a more comfortable RPM. Not every situation needs my full power.
> But taking a small, consistent dose. Does that work?
Typically, no; however, it's context dependent.
> Do you feel you net benefits in life from taking the drug
There are diminishing returns overtime, but there is still some benefit to be had.
> withdrawal and/or tolerance?
Both are real and awful to deal with.
Is it all worth it? I tend to flip-flop back and forth a lot on this.
In my personal testing the Ritalin was much better, dexamphetamine was more up/down and shorter lived. However I didn't really get a crash or lethargy with either, it's just the focus wearing thin (and yes, the benefits were real and massive starting for the first time in my forties).
According to my psych, both have been around 70+ years and are fairly well understood. Longer term therapeutic doses shouldn't be habit forming and tolerance is minor after the initial phase, there's no withdrawal effects and it's easy to forget to take a dose if your routine changes. My morning coffee is far more demanding in that regard.
I've been a heavy coffee drinker since i was a teenager.
I'm sitting at 13 double espressos today which is about average.
Lately the instant sleepiness post coffee isn't worth the focus, and I'm starting the think medication would be a healthier choice
Just mentioning because curiously it almost entirely put me off caffeine. I still enjoy my morning coffee as a ritual, but sometimes don't finish it. If I have another then the side effects are severe, Ritalin massively boosts those - nerves, jitters, hitting the toilet. Not terrible or dangerous, but just interesting, and honestly caffeine never did a whole lot for me mentally so it's no big loss.
I still consume some but not for tons of caffeine. Check out some meds. Vyvanse is significantly less "cracky" than Adderall imo.
I mean, there is a reason why it's a controlled substance and is heavily abused all across the world. It works and it works well.
Though, I've been on it for about a decade now, and I have lost a large majority of the benefits it once provided.
Surprised that there is no mention to extreme sports in this.
Big "what a rush" moment right after the person does something extreme and survives. Big dose of adrenaline in there not just dopamine but the parallels seem striking
please? all that lingo is above my pay-grade
You can look at my citation manager for some educational resources on the topic however https://www.zotero.org/i_o/collections/C2QRMIZE
But I would mostly recommend a neuroscience textbook. The following link is to the entry discussing what a neurotransmitter is so I think you'll find it immediately interesting https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10957/
In general neurotransmitters trigger a response in the target neuron by interacting with a channel embedded in the cell wall. This can trigger a change in the target cell if the triggered channel causes a protein to be released, or it can be an input signal used by the target to determine whether or not it should fire and pass a signal (through the medium of neurotransmitters) on to the neurons it itself targets.
If you are interested in the topic I strongly recommend creating a personal glossary for yourself. That textbook I linked has one I believe, and that ncbi domain has many other useful resources. There is a lot of simple sentences whose meaning is obscured purely because of a deficit of vocabulary, once you get some definitions down then a lot of medical texts really open up.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6813d85a-4d20-800f-881a-9b6133281d...
I fed it the article and asked for a python sim.
> The researchers were surprised that when they activated VTA dopaminergic inputs into the aBLA they could reinstate fear even without any new foot shocks, impairing fear extinction.
That... seems like the first step in being able to literally induce fear without having to bother with pesky things like finding the subject's triggers. Although I suppose if one has direct access to the subject's amygdala, the point is somewhat moot.
Still, it's sort of like a reverse wirehead.
Those organizations do it because they want to, not because it works.