Can we stop blaming dopamine?
And why there's no one molecule to blame for all your problems.
Every few years, it seems, dopamine makes the rounds. Do you have a dopamine addiction? A dopamine craving? Have you tried anti-dopamine parenting?
….I’m sorry I went to make a joke about that but my eyes rolled so hard it caused me physical pain. That entire article is anti-dopamine to me.
Before I get into this rant (and oh it WILL be a rant), I feel I need to state my bonafides. My current beat is human-wildlife interactions, of which I am very fond, have several years of experience in, and wrote a whole book about.
But in my previous life, I was a scientist. A scientist who got a Ph.D. in Physiology and Pharmacology (from Wake Forest University School of Medicine), studying…dopamine! Yes! I in fact specifically studied the interactions between two neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin. I was interested in how these two chemical signaling pathways change after people have taken certain drugs, such as methylphenidate (Ritalin), or amphetamine (Adderall), or alcohol (er, alcohol), what have you, for a long time. I wrote papers on it. I am, in fact, so close to dopamine that I have seen it’s little rises and falls, in real time, in the brain of a mouse, as I gave it a drug, and carefully sampled the tiny tiny bits of fluid between that mouse’s brain cells (surgery that I did myself) and ran it through analysis. Bonafides. I have them. I can spot a dopamine tattoo from 100 yards.
And one of the first things I actually wrote about as a science writer was dopamine! I tried to explain that dopamine is NOT ACTUALLY PLEASURE. It’s not addiction. It’s not joy or drugs.
It’s so, so much more complicated and fascinating than that.
But obviously that article, or my many, many other blog posts on the subject, did not take. Because then there was dopamine fasting, and dopamine addiction, and anti-dopamine parenting. So. Here it goes again.
Dopamine is something called a neurotransmitter. These are chemical messengers that float in the teeny spaces between brain cells. They are made and released from little bubbles called vesicles on one cell, and they bind to a protein called a receptor on another cell. The receptors sit in the cell’s membrane, jutting out on either side.
Once it’s bound to the receptor, the receptor protein changes shape on the inside of the cell. Depending on the receptor, this change can pass along a message, increase the cell’s activity, or decrease it. These receptors are like locks, dopamine is like a key. It opens many different types of locks (there are five known types of dopamine receptor).
Dopamine should not linger outside of the cell. So dopamine transporters, little channels on each cell, slurp it back up, allowing it to be bound up in bubbles and released again.
Dopamine is not alone in this regard. There are loads of other neurotransmitters you may have heard of. Glutamate, GABA, serotonin (serotonin has a whopping 14 known receptors, and it’s suspected there are more, some think as many as 21!), norepinephrine. There are homemade cannabinoids and opioids, all of them specific to different receptors. All with transporters to do the recycling.
Not all cells make dopamine. In fact, in the brain, relatively few do! (Even fewer make serotonin, you wanna see serotonin? Take a good hard look at your intestine. But I digress.) On the left of this image you see what NIDA (the National Institute on Drug Abuse), calls the pleasure pathway. This is from an area called the ventral tegmental area (VTA to its friends), located in the middle of the base of the brain, to other areas associated with feelings of reward (good feelings) and reinforcement (wanting to do something again).
This isn’t the only pathway though, in fact, dopamine is also produced in an area called the substantia nigra, very close to the VTA. From there, it projects upward in the center toward an area called the striatum. This area is very important for movement, specifically starting to move. The moment between sitting down and deciding to get up, and lifting your butt from the chair? That’s dopamine. Without it, people have trouble initiating movement. They get stuck, have trouble balancing, shuffle when they walk. Their hands tremble. If you look in the brains of those people, you will see that for many of them, the substantia nigra is no longer there, no longer functional.
This is what a real “dopamine fast” looks like. Parkinson’s Disease.
There roles for dopamine in attention, in psychosis, in breast-feeding, in your gut. But none of these are the dopamine people care about when they write about “anti-dopamine” trends or “dopamine addiction.” When people talk about that they are talking about the first pathway, the VTA.
Many scientists do shortcut and call this pathway the “pleasure” pathway. That’s because if you, say, give a rat a lever, and pressing the lever stimulates that animal’s VTA to send out dopamine to another area calls the nucleus accumbens, that rat will get lever happy until the cows come home. The same thing happens if the lever delivers cocaine to the rat’s blood, for example.
But it also happens if the lever delivers sugar to the rat’s tongue. Or if you give a monkey fruit juice.
Dopamine does play a role in pleasure. Of course it does. But that’s not quite what this dopamine signal is. Because dopamine goes up for juice, but it also goes down, when a monkey expects juice and does not receive any. This is what scientists call a reward prediction error. In this case, dopamine is a signal that you’re about to get something nice. A reward prediction. You don’t get it? Error.
But we’re not done. Dopamine also goes up, for example, when someone is expecting something bad to happen! Heightened vigilance. It’s another kind of prediction, but this time, for something bad.
What dopamine really does is salience: It signals that something is worth paying attention to. It’s a learning signal. Dopamine helps us know where to find good food, clean water, nice music, people we love. Drugs that increase dopamine drastically, then, are something the brain really, really thinks is worth paying attention to.
In this sense, the latest NPR story on “anti-dopamine parenting” is spot on. They note that dopamine is a signal that there’s something here you need to learn.
Where it, and other stories about “dopamine fasting” (you can’t fast from a brain chemical! What are we fasting from next? Oxygen??) fall down is where it all goes next. The idea that cartoons or video games, like pixelated heroin, “highjack” a child’s reward system, turning them into vain, like-chasing monsters who will NOT go to bed.
The trick, apparently, is to practice “anti-dopamine parenting” which in this case includes: Waiting it out, putting the kid somewhere away from screens, redirecting to desired activities, and creating new habits (which are also desired activities, like learning another language, using, er, a screen). The author will think very carefully before introducing something new and addictive. Like an app. Or a new dessert.
This will, in theory, making parenting easier and children angels. Like you honestly think your kids are going to trot off to bed like little lambs just because they haven’t seen a screen all day? C’mon now.
The article swears it’s not the CHILD we’re fighting! It’s their dopamine! Not like toddlers have, say, high impulsivity and little emotional regulation and want independence but also lack agency or capacity! What’s to blame is their dopamine, that evil, addictive chemical.
The fear around dopamine, the easy label of dopamine as a drug itself, “seeking a hit of dopamine,” isn’t just a fear of addiction (though it is that), a fear of fatness and fat stigma (because oh yes, it is definitely that, WHAT IF the kid gets excited about dessert? Horror of horrors!)*, or a fear of losing control (though it’s also that).
It’s also a callback to the puritanical roots of a lot of modern American culture, the idea that pleasure itself is a sin, that we do not deserve joy, chocolate cake, or orgasms. Of the seven deadly sins (not puritanical, yes, I know, don’t @ me), three of them - lust, greed, and gluttony - are about pleasure, and how we must deny ourselves of it. Life IS pain, Highness, anyone who tells you differently is selling something.
Life is, indeed, pain. But it’s pleasure, too.
There is this idea that it’s evil, modern things, things like social media and Pop-tarts and cocaine, that produce hits of dopamine we can stay away from. But the pleasure of soaking in a hot bath? Dopamine has a role in that. The runner’s high? Dopamine’s got a role in that. The joy of being together with people who love you? Dopamine loves that too. The swept away feeling of the Eras Tour? Dopamine! Not every nice thing is addictive, and not every feeling of pleasure or joy is something that needs to be rigorously avoided for fear of enjoying it too much.
For some people, knowing that dopamine is to blame can come as a relief. Knowing that the urge to do something has a source. Like getting a diagnosis can also, for some, be a relief. It’s not a failing, you’re not broken, you’re just different. It’s just dopamine.
But when we label all behaviors we don’t like “dopamine hits” or “dopamine addiction,” we close ourselves off to everything that dopamine does, shoving it all aside in favor of a convenient self-diagnosis that you can pull out over coffee.
It’s not just unfair to dopamine. It’s unfair to us. To call your habits or joys or miseries a dopamine addiction is to fail to question why you are doing what you’re doing, to fail to know yourself.
This whole “anti-dopamine parenting” shlock is just a rewrite of setting boundaries and good habits with your kids, by coating it in sciencey phrases. Do you need “anti-dopamine parenting” to know that kids have the attention spans of hummingbirds (aka “dopamine spikes are short”)? No. You don’t. Do you need “anti-dopamine parenting” to know that you need to have spaces in your house where you kid can calm down and not be riled (aka “microenvironments,” because quiet corner isn’t sciencey enough)? No. Do you need “anti-dopamine parenting” to know that kids thrive with lots of different activities that require their interaction and imagination (oh, I’m sorry, I need to use cool phrases. I mean “Goldilocks activities”)? No.
Instead of seeing “dopamine addiction” behind every TikTok rabbit hole or toddler meltdown, I would like to encourage you to ask yourself questions. Instead of giving yourself a clean self-diagnosis, indulge your curiosity. WHY am I seeking to escape into TikTok? What am I looking to escape? Does this escape make me happy? Is something else going to make me happy instead? Maybe my toddler is melting down because they are tired, and a tired kid is a cranky kid, and the kid would be cranky no matter what?
Maybe you just need to put the dopamine addiction aside and touch grass my friend. Warning: Walking outside to touch grass, and enjoyment of said botanical life, involves dopamine. Use with caution.
Where have you been?
Was it at AwesomeCon where I got to moderate an AMAZING panel on fungi? Because I did, and it was inspired in part by The Last of Us! Make sure to check out the science behind the show.
While we were in lockdown, other mammals were getting out more. They moved 73% further where COVID lockdowns were strict, but less in urban areas—because we weren’t around to make them run away. They also avoided roads less, because fewer cars were on them.
Where have I been?
After round about six months of work. I published a feature at UnDark! It’s about animal models, and what they can, and cannot, do to prevent the next pandemic. It’s got pigs and bats and mice and bioethicists. I hope you check it out.
I also wrote about a cool new idea to protect wheat from hungry hungry mice. How to do it? We’re gonna need…more wheat. That’s right. Camouflaging planted wheat seeds with a tasty wheat smell might confuse mice enough to save a crop!
*The amount of “anti-dopamine” ideas that are entirely about fasting, intermittent fasting, denying yourself sugar or carbs or fat? The idea of “food addiction”? These are all false ideas, most of them based heavily around the idea that if people merely had more control, if they weren’t “addicted to food,” they would be thin, and that being not thin is a sign of weakness. You are not addicted to food (though binge eating disorder is most definitely a thing) any more than you are addicted to water. Body size has nothing to do with morality.