The Problem with Dopamine

Dopamine sounds like a good thing. The “pleasure” molecule. Feeling like winning, success. Learning. Cognition. All good, right?

Well, as usual, humans have found away to push things to the absolute limit, and we are paying a hidden price.

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There is never enough Dopamine.

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To understand what this means, we first need to talk a bit about how the brain works. The human brain, in all of its amazing biologic complexity, is really about two things:

Survival,

Your brain wants to survive, and it wants to do it using the minimum amount of calories it possibly can. We humans have brains that over millions of years have evolved to survive despite significant physical inferiority compared to other predators. We have done this using our logic, our creativity, our inventions…our Dopamine.

As Dopamine reinforces the pathway, it does something else. The synaptic connections between the neurons involved in the pathway become less sensitive, creating some resistance for stimulation and pleasure. The reward is dampened through this reinforcement, and the brain mutes the stimulation of the experience.

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It creates Tolerance.

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Tolerance is the great balancer, the equalizer to the intense excitement that our brains feel in the wake of new creations, new experiences that we want to remember. Recall that our brains are designed to both survive, and be efficient. Tolerance is an efficiency mechanism. When that early Man felt the feeling of success when he started the fire, that stimulation to the brain, the jumping up and down, pounding the ground…this was all a significant caloric expense. The brain doesn’t want to expend a lot of calories…it already expends 10x the amount of energy to keep going as the average body part. It is still designed to survive on the savannah, where calories are rare.

Tolerance is a way for the brain to say “Thank you for that pleasurable experience, I will reinforce the memory so you can easily do it again, but I don’t want you using up too many calories in the future repeating the behavior.”

So what does this mean for us? It means that Transactions will feel less rewarding over time, because our brain will form tolerance to it as Dopamine reinforces the behavior.

Let’s take a trip back hundreds of thousands of years, and observe early Man. He is part of a tribe, all hunting and gathering together, surviving despite large predators around that are meaningfully faster, stronger and with deadlier physical attributes.

He is surviving due to his inventions, such as spears, using skin and fur as coverings…his creative brain. And now that early Man has discovered something amazing:

Rubbing two sticks together sparks a fire.

The experience of creating fire causes a response of excitement, perhaps jumping up and down, yelling and pounding the ground. This is the reward of a successful Transaction, a choice that results in a positive outcome, and now that early Man’s brain “feels” pleasure at the success of that outcome.

Now, Dopamine starts to do its thing. Dopamine becomes elevated in the cortex around the neural pathways that resulted in the successful Transaction. It reinforces those pathways that led to that experience, that choice to rub two sticks together.

The brain learns.

Now, the next time early Man wants to create fire, he has a pathway reinforced in his brain, allowing him to recall the steps that led to this successful outcome. It has cut a path through the jungle of his mind, and he can easily find the path again.

Diminishing reward and increasing tolerance is everywhere. It is in our reactions to receiving a shipment in a few hours, or a rideshare showing up in five minutes. It is in our reaction to likes, or really any emoji response to posts, or “happy birthday” texts, or notifications, or emails…it is mindless scrolling, it is habitual opening our morning news apps, then closing them, then opening them again. It is the result of intense Dopaminergic reinforcement and tolerance. It is all muted, all habitual.

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It is Addiction.

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We see this in our everyday lives so much that we don’t even notice it anymore.

Dopamine is the main neurotransmitter involved in some of the most powerful, addictive drugs out there, like cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin, which activate sensations of pleasure unlike nothing else. Because these are supercharged versions of the Transaction, we can see tolerance form more quickly and with more force than we do with everyday Dopaminergic experiences.

Tolerance to stimulation is completely natural, all part of the brain’s effort to maintain efficiency and live as long as possible. But because we live in this hyperdigital world, this ecosystem of excessive and never-ending stimulation, our brains have formed tolerance and muted our creativity, our ability to learn, our logic and our rationality across a wider spectrum of experience than we truly understand. In fact, because stimulation, addiction and tolerance is happening everywhere, we actually have a tough time recognizing it. But it can be seen if you look.

Sitting at slot machines…

All of these activities started out feeling amazing and special. Now? Basic and average, exhausting and overwhelming. The neural path has been cleared out to where the activity is easy and automatic, but the reward isn’t there anymore.

This is the problem with Dopamine. Experiences designed to make you Transact, to compare and choose, assign utility and feel reward, over and over and over and over again does the same thing that hard drugs do over time. We become habituated to the experience, we lose the rewarding feeling over time due to tolerance, and we eventually land in an addicted state.

Because this is happening absolutely everywhere, tolerance is starting to form on a macro level, a societal level.

Companies are starting and failing faster than ever before, because they are too Transactional…the rewarding feeling of whatever product or service they provide is muted quickly.

This is where we are at. So where do we go from here?