Dopamine often gets a bad rap: researchers have highlighted its role in addiction, binge eating, and compulsive behavior.1–3 Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke has posited that dopamine drives excessive internet and social media consumption, stating, “the smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine for a wired generation.”
Other researchers, like Northwestern University neuroscientist Talia Lerner, emphasize that dopamine is a many-faceted molecule and can mean different things, or serve different purposes, depending on the neuronal subtypes that are sending and receiving these messages. Indeed, dopamine is also involved in many healthy behaviors and positive processes, including learning, social bonding, (in the context of pair bonds and mother-infant bonds) and motor control.4–7 The following articles explore the lighter side of dopamine.
Just Say No to the Dopamine Detox Trend, Researchers Warn
Dopaminergic neurons (green) in the ventral tegmental area, are involved in learning, motivation, and reward processing, and are altered in many neuropsychiatric disorders.
Min Qiao
With the demonization of dopamine in recent years, some productivity “experts” have begun to recommend “dopamine detoxing.” While there are many different interpretations, this usually involves abstaining from stimulating activities, such as eating, talking, or using social media, in order to temporarily lower dopamine and “reset” the system. But researchers say this is simply not how the system works: dopamine circuits are complex and varied, it’s not as though there is a single dial in the brain that turns dopamine levels up or down.
“Dopamine neurons come in all shapes and sizes; some dopamine neurons [also] release other neurotransmitters. Some populations behave really differently: classically, dopamine incentivizes and makes animals work harder for reward…but other people have shown that some dopamine neurons that project to a different part of the nucleus accumbens are actually involved in aversive responses,” said University of Calgary neurobiologist Stephanie Borgland.
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Dopaminergic Neurons Play a Role in Combating Depression
While many antidepressants target serotonin and norepinephrine, research suggests that certain dopaminergic pathways may also be important in relieving depression-like symptoms. Research in humans has demonstrated that for some individuals with treatment-resistant depression, one night of sleep deprivation can serve as a rapid-acting antidepressant, but the mechanisms are not well understood. Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, showed that in mice, sleep deprivation-mediated reversal of depressive behaviors was dependent on dopamine release in the medial prefrontal cortex. This research provides insights into which brain regions may be promising targets for new types of antidepressant strategies.
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Romantic Rodents Help Researchers Study Dopamine and Pair Bonding
New research in prairie voles showed that maintaining social pair bonds and recovering from lost bonds is controlled by dopamine in the brain’s reward center, the nucleus accumbens.
CU Boulder, Zoe Donaldson
Most small-animal models commonly used in research don’t necessarily develop strong bonds with their mates, so researchers have to get creative when they want to study the animal version of love. Luckily, monogamous prairie voles have turned out to be a good model for studying the formation of pair bonds. University of Colorado Boulder neuroscientist Zoe Donaldson found that dopamine may play an important role in these pair bonds: When the voles worked to reunite with their partners, dopamine was released in the nucleus accumbens. However, when the bond was broken, this was reflected in the dopamine dynamics: After a “breakup,” voles no longer experienced this surge of dopamine when they saw their partners again.
Read more about voles in love here.
Drinking Water Feels Rewarding Thanks to Dopamine
For a dehydrated individual, drinking water feels amazing. This is a bit odd, since several minutes pass between gulping water and actually becoming rehydrated when the water enters the bloodstream and rebalances blood osmolality. “The concept of satiation or rehydration and the rewarding feeling are separable components,” explained Yuki Oka, a biologist at the California Institute of Technology who studies how organisms sense internal imbalances and initiate corrective actions. Instead, studies in mice revealed that gulping water resulted in dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens, part of the brain’s reward circuitry.
Get the scoop on dopamine and thirst-quenching behaviors in the full story.
Like many neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, dopamine plays different roles in different brain regions and different situations. Learning more about how it affects mood, cognition, and behavior could help scientists develop new techniques to tweak dopaminergic signaling in beneficial ways.
