Saturday, December 08, 2012

dopamine: not about pleasure anymore...,



uconn | “Often, depressed people say they don’t want to go out with their friends,” says Salamone. But it’s not that they don’t experience pleasure, he says – if their friends were around, many depressed people could have fun.

“Low levels of dopamine make people and other animals less likely to work for things, so it has more to do with motivation and cost/benefit analyses than pleasure itself,” he explains.

In essence, says Salamone, this is how amphetamines work, which increase dopamine levels and help people motivate to focus on tasks at hand.

“When you give people amphetamines, you see them putting more effort into things,” he says.
The big implications of this change in understanding come at the level of overlapping motivational symptoms of depression with those seen in other disorders such as schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease. Symptoms of fatigue may be related to low levels of dopamine or changes in other parts of the same brain circuitry.

On the one hand, this lack of perceived energy is maladaptive, because it reduces the tendency to interact with the environment. But, Salamone says, it could also reflect the body’s attempt to save energy in a crisis.
He points out that new ideas in science are traditionally met with criticism. But after all the mounting evidence, he says he’s no longer regarded as “a crazy rebel,” but simply someone who thought differently.
“Science is not a collection of facts. It’s a process,” he says. “First we thought dopamine was involved only in movement. Then that faded and we thought it was pleasure. Now we’ve gone beyond that data on pleasure.”

Although he has thought about writing a popular-press book, he’s not sure he really wants to go to the public and “debunk” the dopamine hypothesis of pleasure and reward. But if he ever does, one thing is for sure.
“I can sum up all this work with one phrase, which would make a great book title,” he says. “Dopamine: it’s not about pleasure anymore.” Fist tap Arnach.

9 comments:

Big Don said...

..."He points out that new ideas in science are traditionally met with criticism." He got that part right...

CNu said...

lol, how would you know - given your penchant for old, discredited ideas?

Big Don said...

..."discredited ideas and pseudo-science..." [???]
Rushton, Jensen, Lynn, et al got an S_Load of snarlation from folks who didn't like what PRR was being published, but there was never any credible countering scientific evidence. Just endless whining, belly-aching, moaning and gnashing of teeth. Where are the PRR citations for refutation of BD's Library? Where are the books? Any time real data was assembled and analyzed, there was only one possible conclusion....

CNu said...

No one goes to the trouble of refuting flat-earther theorists anymore either - more's the pity...,

Big Don said...

...Oh?,,,. So where is the equivalent of the Flat-Earth-Refutation...?? You know, the PRR equivalent of Columbus...????

CNu said...

lol, you need to study history a bit more carefully BD. Heliocentrism was a very ancient pre-Columbian understanding, not in need of any Columbian application. The outgassings of your HBD/racial realist obsessives is on no better applied or scientific footing than flat-eartherism, and is correspondingly not given serious mainstream consideration.

Big Don said...

Columbus voyage was the apparent initial first-hand round-earth confirmation.

But since you insist, where is the Heliocenter of Egalitarianistic Understanding...??

Tom said...

BD. CNu's point here is that even re the shape of the planet, you routinely accept and defend pseudo-history at approx. the Bugs-Bunny cartoon level.

The ancient Greeks knew the world was round almost 2,000 years before Columbus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Summary_of_evidence_for_a_spherical_earth
They had decent estimates of the circumference of the Earth too.

Columbus' 'contribution' was to insist--filled with typical grant-proposal wishful-thinking--that the Earth's circumference was much smaller than it was known to be. That's why he couldn't get funding. If he hadn't run into the West Indies he would have died of starvation long before he hit Asia. And all educated people--even in Western Europe--knew that.

Tom said...

Just in case the Greek connection tends to give anybody the idea that science is somehow fundamentally European:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_astronomy

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