Dopamine is not addictive (2017)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/201701/no-dopamine-is-not-addictive

by vonmoltke • 6 years ago

158 54 6 years ago

The author tries to argue that dopamine is not addictive by talking about how the absence of dopamine can affect critical bodily functions but never sufficiently disproves the well researched claim that dopamine when given in artificially large amounts, which is crucial point when talking about dopamine addiction, is indeed addictive. At best the author is making a technical distinction that for the most part is inconsequential.

conistonwater• 6 years ago

That is not at all the argument they are making, as far as I can tell.

smt88• 6 years ago

At best the author is making a technical distinction that for the most part is inconsequential.

I disagree. He explains why the technical distinction is important.

His main point is this: dopamine production alone does not indicate that an activity is addictive. He even highlights absurd conclusions drawn using this logic -- that gun ownership is addictive, for example.

To put it another way: even if dopamine release is required to produce addiction, not all dopamine release can lead to addiction.

Dopamine itself does not produce euphoria[1]; it has a variety of roles in the brain; and it is produced during many non-addictive activities (e.g. skiing or finishing a large puzzle).

As the author touches upon, and other researchers confirm in more depth[1][2][3], the reality of dopamine production is complex. Not all dopamine production is the same. It varies by brain region, quantity, and duration, all of which vary its effect on the brain.

"However, while the acute reinforcing effects of drugs of abuse that depend on such fast DA increases are likely 'necessary' for the development of addiction, they are clearly not 'sufficient.' Repeated drug exposure causes changes in DA brain function that take time to develop because they result from secondary neuroadaptations in other neurotransmitter systems (e.g. glutamate and perhaps also γ-aminobutyiric acid (GABA)) that, eventually, affect additional brain circuits modulated by DA."[2]

1. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/feb/03/dopamine-the...

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2948245/

3. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/22/9/3306

jmull• 6 years ago

...never sufficiently disproves the well researched claim that dopamine when given in artificially large amounts...is indeed addictive.

The article is actually addressing the issue where dopamine in natural amounts is considered addictive and harmful, so it doesn’t need to address that.

adrianmonk• 6 years ago

The article's point is not that dopamine isn't involved in addiction. It's that knowing that dopamine is involved isn't enlightening. What's enlightening is to understand why you get addicted to things that are bad for you. And for that you have to look at the specifics of the situation, not just at the chemical.

It's a little bit like saying, hey, I took a road and I went to the wrong destination. Let me look at the road and understand this process. It is paved with asphalt, so maybe asphalt is the problem. Maybe the road surface is too good and easily drivable. Which doesn't make sense, because (a) roads that take you to good destinations are also paved with asphalt and (b) you ended up at a bad destination because of a wrong turn rather than because of the road conditions.

perl4ever• 6 years ago

I wonder if this can be generalized along the lines of: problems with processes tend to be dynamic issues, but people want to look for static issues.

Like, if something is wrong with your car, it would be nice if there was some magic elixir you can add to fix it, and indeed any auto parts store has dozens. They have fuel injector cleaner, engine stabilizer, stop leak, no smoke additive... But if there is a real problem, it probably requires doing something to fix the way moving parts are interacting, not just adding a little fluid.

Which seems to me suggestive of an analogy with how people* talking about adjusting the levels of brain chemicals, when surely it's got to be a dynamic process that isn't working right.

*as in, the people who write the patient info pamphlets for psychotropic drugs

seemslegit2• 6 years ago

It's basically a longform "guns don't kill people" argument for dopamine and addiction.

bryanrasmussen• 6 years ago

normally the X doesn't do Y (bad thing) argument is being made to push the cause of getting more X out there, or at least keeping the supply of X from getting limited.

Is there a movement to increase dopamine access in middle America I'm unaware of?

seemslegit2• 6 years ago

He's arguing that colloquial demonization of dopamine as the cause of addiction isn't fair because dopamine is necessary for normal cognitive functioning and isn't accurate because dopamine is not itself the feel-good hormone, then proceeds to tell that dopamine helps attribute reward to behaviour.

skohan2• 6 years ago

In another life I was a research assistant in a lab studying drug addiction, and our operating assumption was that - like any other system in the brain - it's not as simple as saying "neurotransmitter X causes Y". But there does seem to be an awful lot of evidence (or at least there was a lot of evidence cerca 2008-2009) to suggest that dopamine is heavily involved in motivation and habit formation, which are easily linked to addiction.

k__2• 6 years ago

Half-OT: I never understood this.

To me it seems random actions cause dopamin production.

Like, how does the body know that it should release more dopamin when I scroll HN than when I learn Rust, or ride my bike?

Simulacra• 6 years ago

I think it’s your brain. Something stimulates the production of dopamine, so your brain rewards you. that reward in turn wants you to get more reward. I think that’s why we keep hitting refresh on Facebook and all the social media and hacker news, trying to get that next hit of “happy”

eli_gottlieb• 6 years ago

Phasic dopamine and tonic dopamine may be coding two different things. IIRC, phasic dopamine helps to code the "value of effort".

Pelic4n• 6 years ago

HN is not different to other social media. It will feed you a lot of small, digestible units of content that will do something to you. Each of these feelings are rewarded by a hit of dopamin. The dopamin flow is neat, but not enough to makes you feel great or like you've accomplished something. So you go for more and you keep scrolling. You will not react the same to each unit of content, which create a very addictive system known as a skinner box (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber). It will continuously give you small hits of dopamin, sometimes giving you a lot, keeping you hooked for those big hits in a very tight feedback loop.

Learning Rust, while stimulating, does not has that tight reward loop, so you are not addicted to learning Rust but to scrolling HN as your easy dopamin dispenser. You need to invest a lot of effort into learning something complex as Rust (or painting, or whatever which require a good amount of knowledge and practice.) before getting that dopamin reward.

IggleSniggle• 6 years ago

I think many folks here didn't actually read the article, which addresses some of these questions. Dopamine is a learning marker that is a precursor to rewards. The first time you get the big reward, there is no dopamine, but you also might not remember it particularly well. The next time you are engaged in a behavior the previously gave you a reward, you get a hit of dopamine which helps you pay extra attention to the details surrounding the reward hit.

That is, it is the habit drug. It helps you remember the precise nature of recurrent rewards, and presumably is "intended" to help you get better are arriving at the reward.

heavyset_go• 6 years ago

Like, how does the body know that it should release more dopamin when I scroll HN than when I learn Rust, or ride my bike?

Any basic psychology course or textbook will provide the context to understand this. You could look at it as operant conditioning, and there are probably much more nuanced and data driven explanations that I'm ignorant of.

Geee• 6 years ago

There's this thing called "Dopamine detox" which is basically trying to restrain from all the easy dopamine sources such as social media, news, games etc. and after a while learning Rust becomes as easy to accomplish than scrolling HN.

4886436892• 6 years ago

Like, how does the body know that it should release more dopamin when I scroll HN than when I learn Rust, or ride my bike?

I think dopamine is not "reward", but "anticipation of reward". It's how long your brain can wait untill it evaluates the success of an action. Upon success you gain more dopamine, which enables you to do new tasks.

So dopamine is essential in executive functions like planning and focus.

The problem arises from the evolutionary adaptations we carry, like finding scarce cheap energy like easy carbs (pre agricultural world had nothing sweeter than a carrot), which gives us dopamine from eating sweets today. Your brain also likes new information, which does not leave your model of reality in shambles. There are probably other mundane "self-efficacy" experiences rewarded, like voting and commenting.

I assume there is some feedback loop which will make the pleasant feeling of actual reward greater, the less "anticipation of reward" dopamine was spend. This is basically a scarcity adapted self-improvement algorithm, which is defunct in modern abundance.

refurb• 6 years ago

to suggest that dopamine is heavily involved in motivation and habit formation, which are easily linked to addiction.

This is a great, succinct summary of (some of) dopamines role (from our limited understanding) in the brain.

It’s complex, but based on the tools we have to manipulate and measure dopamine, it’s a part of addiction but it doesn’t explain everything.

And dopamine plays an important role in other functions like movement (I.e. Parkinson’s disease).

superkuh• 6 years ago

In the jargon of the field, it's neccessary but maybe not sufficient. Anyway, dopaminergic firing in the ventral palidum does code for anticipated reward and incentive salience. It's just that dopamine has nothing to do with actual pleasure or enjoyment (that'd be the lateral shell of the nucleus accumbens and glutamate firing). Dopaminergic populations are prediction and addiction.

limeblack• 6 years ago

If you read into the D1 receptor values you will quickly conclude that deregulation causes up regulation so its correct to say they are not addictive, but dopamine receptors are some of the worst off receptors in the body for regulation ignoring Opiods and anxiety/sleep medications.

rjkennedy98• 6 years ago

dopamine is heavily involved in motivation and habit formation, which are easily linked to addiction.

You could literally say this about most major neurotransmitters.

Frankly, the fact that the scientific community allows things like the chemical imbalance theory and dopamine addiction theories and other pseudoscience to gain such mainstream acceptance delegitimizes the institution. Scientists should not be defending such statements in the wishy-washy way you did above.

skohan2• 6 years ago

What do you mean exactly? Are you arguing that dopamine activity in the Nucleus Accumbens does not play a particular mechanistic role in reward seeking behavior? Or that norepinephrine plays an equivalent role in this mechanism?

I'm not sure where I defended the chemical imbalance theory in my comment.

EdgarVerona• 6 years ago

Ultimately, much of this argument feels pedantic. Yes, people are giving oversimplified descriptions of what's going on when they say dopamine is "addictive." That's because it's easier to describe than incentive salience - but ultimately, the end result is what they care about. It's the behavioral conditioning that people are upset about, which is experimentally proven to be both effective and intentionally leveraged by many industries with great "success."

I do agree with his statement that we need to talk more about the complex reasons for that behavior on top of behavioral conditioning, and that people caught in those cycles can and should leverage the means that we have at our disposal to undo that conditioning when it is harmful to them (with professional help as needed). But I think it is absolutely valid to talk about how behavioral conditioning is intentionally leveraged in the design of many products we use, in casinos, etc. And that it is not something that people can or do consciously notice.

Before people can help themselves, they need to even realize there is a problem in the first place, and that is one of the dangerous things about behavioral conditioning. Conditioning is the very mechanism by which we learn new behaviors that become integrated into our life: and as such, it is very easy for a person to fall prey to operant conditioning and for it to just feel like "life as normal," even when the patterns in your life have actually changed dramatically.

In particular, I think it's important for us to be aware of behavioral conditioning as an intentional design choice of the products we use and the entertainment we engage in. The more we are consciously aware of it, the more we can develop the sort of meta-cognition that allows us to notice when we fall into patterns of conditioning that are harming us more than helping us. (note that you can also be conditioned to engage in behaviors that are helpful too! So being aware of what you are conditioning yourself for is as important as whether/when you are being conditioned)

wtf_is_up• 6 years ago

No, X Is Not Y

This template seems like an extension of Betteridge's law of headlines

api• 6 years ago

Nearly all popular science journalism is either vastly oversimplified or outright trash. If you want the real story you have to study the actual science, which means reading papers or at least reading articles like this one written by actual practicing scientists or other professionals (doctors, engineers) very familiar with the science. Even then you should cross-reference and gather multiple opinions from the field.

Same goes for pop understandings of science. My favorite is "survival of the fittest" for Darwinian evolutionary theory, which is basically wrong as it's vastly oversimplified and prone to enormous misunderstandings. A more accurate and modern version would be "differential rates of reproduction of patterns of genetic information that influence the formation of phenotypes in proportion to those phenotypes' performance of said reproduction." Not as catchy, and much harder to use to rationalize popular cultural and political fads.

DubiousPusher• 6 years ago

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,

Choice quote IMO.

caleb-allen• 6 years ago

The author here put into words what it was that I couldn't articulate about why I felt "off" about Simon Sinek.

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

This is how all the quack medicine hucksters on PBS work by stringing together unrelated facts that make them seem knowledgeable.

abvdasker• 6 years ago

Because the vocabulary and aesthetics of science have become very popular, I keep seeing public figures and people on social media using things that look or sound scientific to advance their own agenda, usually political or commercial. Charlatans like Simon Sinek rely on the audience's uncritical acceptance of their expertise and ignorance of the underlying field or the scientific process as a whole.

Whenever I see this sort of thing it makes me want to scream.

hexxiiiz• 6 years ago

I suppose more succinctly, claiming that dopamine causes addiction is like claiming that the cam shaft is what makes a car go. Addiction is a phenomena that involves what appears to be a lot of factors and components; dopamine appears to be one of them. I think this is the misapprehension the article is trying to rectify, but I am not sure that the way the article pursues the case it makes really simplifies things.

In biological, let alone neurological systems, the notion of cause is far less discrete than it is in a reductive area such as basic physics. Many of the long term effects in these kinds of systems arise in circumstances where there are clearly feedback loops and many of them overlapping. One component may be involved in the dynamics of addiction, regulating motor functions, and learning, and each of these phenomena involve many components. The neurotrash that pushes the message that dopamine is somehow the causal component in the process of addiction appeals to the reductive interest in seeing every effect as the consequence of a straightforward cause.

This kind of thinking in public perception also might be the consequence of the pharma industry pushing a narrative of "chemical imbalances" being at the root of behavioral and psychological problems, discharging from this picture factors on many other levels such as past experiences, mental associations, social and familial conditions, economic circumstances, etc... all of which can contribute to addiction as a phenomena.

entropyneur• 6 years ago

This popularization of neuroscience dumbed down to the point of losing the grain of truth is really upsetting.

90 billion neurons in our brain, interconnected in some combinatorial number of ways, but all our behavior and inner world boils down to the interaction of a few dozen neurotransmitters. Yup, sounds about right.

GuB-422• 6 years ago

Why not? Psychoactive drugs are small molecules that can completely change your behavior by doing what your natural neurotransmitters do. You can call them the global variables of your brain, on which the billions of neurons rely.

Our brain "code" is messier than anything mad programmers could have produced. Global variables are generally not a good practice, so of course our brain has global variables. And of course they are reused for completely unrelated things, for example lactation and the immune system, because life is like that. Life never read about pure functions and design patterns and will happily use floating point numbers as pointers and jump between two instructions.

Back to the subject, I think it is just a case of circular reasoning. Dopamine is part of the reward system, and addictive stuff cause dopamine to be released. To limit addiction, limit things that cause dopamine to be released. So, to limit addiction, you have to limit things that are addictive.

nmfisher• 6 years ago

they are reused for completely unrelated things, for example lactation and the immune system

Can you expand on this a bit more?

james_s_tayler2• 6 years ago

86 billion right?

Ace17• 6 years ago

The article talks about addiction, but doesn't talk about withdrawal. Is "dopamine withdrawal" a thing in medical science?

Wohlf• 6 years ago

I don't know about that, but dopamine deficiency is certainly a thing.

gregwebs• 6 years ago

It's really important for everyone to understand the point of the middle of this article which can be summarized as: "dopamine is not a reward, it is the expectation of a reward".

However, this doesn't mean that one cannot be addicted to dopamine. Lab rats will submit themselves to physical harm to get more dopamine and humans given a dopamine button keep pressing it for more. This is explained in the book "The Willpower Instinct".

It's probably the case though that you would only see a psychologist like the author of this article for an addiction to a true reward chemical (like opioids). A dopamine addiction is more likely to be something like checking your phone for messages every few minutes.

The usefulness of dopamine is to provide motivation. So unfortunately the solution to a perceived dopamine problem isn't to broadly have less dopamine (then you won't want to get off the couch), but to somehow have less associated with the activity you don't want to do and more associated with the activity you do want to do.

keenmaster• 6 years ago

If someone has what is ostensibly a "dopamine problem," they should consider changing one or more of the following, depending on the situation:

- their environment (residence, city, state, country)

- their job, career, or academic pursuit

- their romantic life

- their friends

People have completely transformed as a result of one move, with an example being someone from a small town in the Midwest moving to New York City. I think everyday productivity hacks, motivation hacks, anti-habits, etc...are marginally overrated. They could even be damaging if they keep you in an environment or circumstance that you are fundamentally incompatible with. Conversely, big structural life changes are underrated.

If someone reading this found the above to be true (or not) in their personal life, please weigh in.

Dopamine is not addictive (2017)

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