dopamine

“So there's actually a functional loss in your ability to imagine the future. And then when you do imagine the future, even if you're thinking about things that normally you get, would get you excited, your brain is basically refusing to fire up The pathways th…”

“There's a paper published in the European Journal of Physiology. It showed that there's a 2.5 X huge increase in dopamine release, very long lasting. 2.5 X is the amount of dopamine that's triggered by the use of cocaine, but the difference is cocaine has a ve…”

“Now about 10% of people have a genetic predisposition to get a big dopamine increase from alcohol.”

“That's not a placebo effect. That's a real effect of the release of cortisol and adrenaline into your body. The release of dopamine is controlled by light, powerful neuromodulator that makes you feel good.”

“Dopamine is the most important neurotransmitter for the experience of pleasure, reward, and motivation. It's not the only neurotransmitter involved in that process, but it is the common pathway for all reinforcing substances and behaviors. Anything that's rein…”

“The other thing is that that's very important here is that once people start to become addicted, what's salient is not so much the release of dopamine when they're getting high or experiencing pleasure, but it's actually the decrease in dopamine in between or …”

“There's also a little mini spike in dopamine when they see the light, so just anticipating the drug gets us a little bit high, but the really interesting thing is that right after that little increase in dopamine from the light, we actually go below baseline l…”

“Well, it was originally thought that dopamine was primarily related to the experience of pleasure, euphoria, getting high, but a series of important experiments suggest that dopamine may be even more important for motivation, that is our willingness to do the …”