The most interesting thing I learned this week is that animals whose dopamine system has been rendered inactive will fail to seek food, and will starve to death if left to themselves," but will eat and swallow with pleasure if food is placed in their mouths.
I'm not always an animal-lover type person, but I found it a bit crushing to picture an animal whose life force had been so sapped that food was something they just couldn't be bothered with. Something about the poor little critter chomping gratefully if someone took the trouble, but unable to rouse itself for action struck me as the bleakest metaphor for existence ever.
I found that fact on Wikipedia when I went down a looking-up-dopamine rabbit-hole. I looked up dopamine because I was reflecting on how my motivation or mood seems to change in the evenings, even when I'm not feeling especially fatigued. Why would the sunset cause a mood change? Posing that question made me think of "sundowning," where people with dementia become agitated at sunset. Looking up "sundowning," I learned that one hypothesis is about hormone changes, and that hormones standardly change in accordance with circadian rhythms. One of those changes is that dopamine goes down in the evening.
If I understand correctly, the standard dopamine scheme is that pleasure causes a release of dopamine, which then reinforces the motivation to seek the behavior. In the framework, the “wanting” and the "liking" systems are distinct: pleasure is one thing, and motivation is another, and dopamine is the contingently existing link between the two. Pleasure from a reward and the motivation to seek it thus emerge from separate biological pathways.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like this explains a lot. A lot of our cultural "common sense" encodes a set-up in which the reason you seek out a thing is because you anticipate the thing will bring you pleasure. If it’s true about how dopamine works, things aren’t quite so simple. You can anticipate the pleasure and not have the drive, or you can have the drive without anticipating the pleasure. And the concept of a "reason" barely fits in there at all.
I was surprised to learn that drugs like meth and cocaine mainly hit the "wanting" while opiates activate both wanting and liking. Not surprisingly, addiction can mean elevated "wanting" alongside decreased "liking," if you’ve built up a tolerance for the thing you’re addicted to. So they really are distinct systems.
Distinct systems fits my experience better than the common sense/pleasure anticipation theory does. It’s often opaque to me why I have or lack the motivations that I do. I enjoy running outside once I get going, but frequently I have to push and drag myself out there. I’ve always wondered: shouldn’t my mind update via a feedback mechanism, where liking would cause motivation? Why wouldn’t it? Well — I still don’t know, but it’s a bit less mysterious now.
Obviously the next question is how you might improve your dopamine function so you can enjoy the resulting motivation and Life Force. A person doesn’t live by pleasure alone. Obviously, if you want to increase your pleasure/liking, you can do things you enjoy. But if you want to increase your dopamine/wanting you can … ?
Weirdly, official advice on the internet about increasing your dopamine is that if you want to increase your dopamine, you should — do things you enjoy. The thinking seems to be that since pleasure experiences release dopamine, a way to increase your dopamine is to do the things you enjoy. I get it, but like a lot of official advice, it doesn’t quite add up. If your dopamine system isn’t working well, all the pleasure in the world won’t help you, because it won’t create the motivation.
Other things you can do to increase your dopamine include exercising, eating healthy food, and getting enough sleep and sunshine. So I guess where all this ends up is that while you might think the reasons you do things have to do with your thoughts, plans, and intentions, a lot of it also comes down to animal nature.
We humans and that starving critter are all in the same boat, just praying that our fragile dopamine connection between liking and wanting isn't wantonly destroyed, rudely hijacked, or just left to desiccate and decay.
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