Really excellent post. Brings together a lot of what I have seen concerning the role of dopamine in substance addiction and reward. Very well presented and thought through as much of it has seemed contradictory to my amateur understanding. It does seem that the basic model currently incorporates the findings of Volkow, Koob, and Berridge/Robinson as ongoing processes contributing to the addiction cycle.
Sadly the recovery community is inundated by pop science promising to “boost your dopamine” with supplements and sunshine or dismissing neurobiology and the disease model altogether writing it off as normal adaptation to stressors and emotional pain.
I was wondering if it would be OK to post a link to this page on my website sobersynthesis.com it is non commercial and just a hobby I started with the goal of providing information to the recovery community.
Hey Jefff - thanks for the kind feedback. Someone on reddit – maybe you!? – posted a link in the huberman sub to your website. I'm quite interest in addiction myself, so actually had one or two of your pieces in my to-read list already. :)
It made me think of how across most theories presented here stimuli tend to take an "a priori" value, and posited as a "source" or "cause" for different dopaminergic mechanisms. I was wondering whether you'd come across (or even if it makes sense to you given your research), anything that inverts that direction of causality and instead begins with the availability/amount of dopamine in an individual's system?
For instance, well-studied mutations to the COMT gene have been found to significantly alter how dopamine is processed and therefore how much dopamine is available at any given time for different individuals. To follow one of your examples, maybe someone with recurrent lower-levels of dopamine in their system might develop either hyper-focused motivation (possibly survival based) ie. all their dopamine goes into signalling one particular effort as rewarding but then "there's not enough left" to motivate other behaviours, or are simply chronically under-motivated (and potentially under-engaged and under-learned?).
I know this boils down to the classic, never-ending "nature vs. nurture" dilemma, and the answer is almost always "probably both", but still worth discussing hopefully.
Hey Frazer, love the post - Seeds of Science is interested in cross-posting it on our Best of Science Blogging feed. Reach out to us at info@theseedsofscience.org if you are interested.
Hey there – I sent an email to the address you shared last week, but haven't heard anything back as of yet. If you folks are no longer interested in reposting, that's all good – just wanted to make sure that my email hasn't disappeared into a spam folder or something :)
Really excellent post. Brings together a lot of what I have seen concerning the role of dopamine in substance addiction and reward. Very well presented and thought through as much of it has seemed contradictory to my amateur understanding. It does seem that the basic model currently incorporates the findings of Volkow, Koob, and Berridge/Robinson as ongoing processes contributing to the addiction cycle.
Sadly the recovery community is inundated by pop science promising to “boost your dopamine” with supplements and sunshine or dismissing neurobiology and the disease model altogether writing it off as normal adaptation to stressors and emotional pain.
I was wondering if it would be OK to post a link to this page on my website sobersynthesis.com it is non commercial and just a hobby I started with the goal of providing information to the recovery community.
Hey Jefff - thanks for the kind feedback. Someone on reddit – maybe you!? – posted a link in the huberman sub to your website. I'm quite interest in addiction myself, so actually had one or two of your pieces in my to-read list already. :)
Absolutely, feel free to share far and wide!
Thank you, I will just post something with a link to your article and send you the link.
The link is posted here
https://sobersynthesis.com/2024/04/23/new-dopamine-explained/
Great post, thank you!
It made me think of how across most theories presented here stimuli tend to take an "a priori" value, and posited as a "source" or "cause" for different dopaminergic mechanisms. I was wondering whether you'd come across (or even if it makes sense to you given your research), anything that inverts that direction of causality and instead begins with the availability/amount of dopamine in an individual's system?
For instance, well-studied mutations to the COMT gene have been found to significantly alter how dopamine is processed and therefore how much dopamine is available at any given time for different individuals. To follow one of your examples, maybe someone with recurrent lower-levels of dopamine in their system might develop either hyper-focused motivation (possibly survival based) ie. all their dopamine goes into signalling one particular effort as rewarding but then "there's not enough left" to motivate other behaviours, or are simply chronically under-motivated (and potentially under-engaged and under-learned?).
I know this boils down to the classic, never-ending "nature vs. nurture" dilemma, and the answer is almost always "probably both", but still worth discussing hopefully.
Hey Frazer, love the post - Seeds of Science is interested in cross-posting it on our Best of Science Blogging feed. Reach out to us at info@theseedsofscience.org if you are interested.
https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/
Hey there – I sent an email to the address you shared last week, but haven't heard anything back as of yet. If you folks are no longer interested in reposting, that's all good – just wanted to make sure that my email hasn't disappeared into a spam folder or something :)
it did ;)
Hey Roger – thanks very much, glad you enjoyed the post!
Very much interested – will drop you an email now.