The first one is a really tragic situation that occurred. This was in the '80s. There was an outbreak of what looked like Parkinsonian symptoms in a young population. So many of you heard of Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease is a disease in which people initially start to quake, can't generate smooth movements. They'll have issues with speech, sometimes cognition as well. There are examples like Michael J. Fox, which are early onset Parkinson's. Typically, it hits people a little bit later in life. There's a genetic component, but there is this question, and there's always been this question, whether or not certain lifestyle factors can also create Parkinson's. And some years ago, there was a situation where street laboratories, illicit laboratories, were trying to make a drug called MPPP, which is an opioid-like compound. It's a bit like heroin, and heroin addicts seeking heroin went out and bought what they thought was MPPP.

Dopamine is what we call a neuromodulator. Neuromodulators are different than neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are involved in the dialogue between neurons, nerve cells, and neurotransmitters tend to mediate local communication. Just imagine two people talking to one another at a concert. That communication between them is analogous to the communication carried out by neurotransmitters, whereas neuromodulators influence the communication of many neurons. Imagine a bunch of people dancing where it's a coordinated dance involving 10 or 20 or hundreds of people. Neuromodulators are coordinating that dance. In the nervous system what this means is that dopamine release changes the probability that certain neural circuits will be active and that other neural circuits will be inactive. So it modulates a bunch of things all at once. And that's why it's so powerful at shifting not just our levels of energy, but also our mindset, also our feelings of whether or not we can or cannot accomplish something. Research has found that reading novels improves our brain functions on a variety of levels, including the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes and flex your imagination. It also boosts our innovative thinking skills. Take it from Elon Musk, arguably one of the most innovative minds of our time. He's said that growing up, he spent more than 10 hours a day pouring through science fiction novels. In today's rapidly changing world, innovation is necessary for any business to stay competitive. I'm just not feeling like I have the same energy that I did a few years ago. And of course, there are age-related reasons why people can experience drops in energy, but oftentimes what's happening is not some sort of depletion in cellular metabolism that's related to aging, what's happening is they're spiking their dopamine through so many different activities throughout the week that their baseline is progressively dropping. And in this case, it can be very subtle, it can be very, very subtle, and that's actually a very sinister function of dopamine, we could say, which is that it can often drop in imperceptible ways, but then once it reaches a threshold of low dopamine, we just feel like, hmm, we can't really get pleasure from anything anymore. What used to work doesn't work anymore. So it starts to look a lot like the more severe addictions, or the more acute addictions, to things like cocaine and amphetamine, which lead to these big increases, these big spikes in dopamine and then these very severe drops in the baseline. This is a very interesting book on how just one chemical – Dopamine influences so much of our behaviour. The undue influence Dopamine exerts is amazing considering the fraction the Dopamine circuit occupies in our brains. This is a well written book and very informative as well. One wonders if all of the author's interpretations are as inelegant and rudimentary as his take on the concept of eudaimonia.activities and things that we ingest. All of us have different baseline levels of dopamine. Some of this is sure to be genetic. Some people just simply ride at a level a little bit higher. They're a little bit more excited, they're a little bit more motivated, or maybe they're a lot more excited or a lot more motivated. Some people are a little mellower, some people are a little less excitable, and some of that has to do with the fact that dopamine doesn't act alone. Dopamine has close cousins or friends in the nervous system, and I'll just name off a few of those close cousins and friends. Reading is the best, not to mention the easiest, way to shore up our creative thinking and give our brains a break from digital overload — which, according to a 2019 Workplace Productivity Report, more than half of the workforce experiences. With that in mind, here are some strategies for making quality reading time a part of your daily routine. 1. Stash your devices Rather than giving us pleasure itself, as is commonly thought, dopamine motivates us to do things we think will bring pleasure. As the brain’s major reward and pleasure neurotransmitter, it’s what drives us to seek pizza when we’re hungry and sex when we’re aroused. Scientists use dopamine to measure “the addictive potential of any experience,” writes Lembke. The higher the dopamine release, the more addictive the thing. You don't do the exercise and expect dopamine to arrive through some, what we call, exogenous source as well. You might think, "Well, that sounds lame. I want to continue to enjoy exercising." Ah, but that's exactly the point. If you want to maintain motivation for school, exercise, relationships, or pursuits of any duration and kind, the key thing is to make sure that the peak in dopamine, if it's very high, doesn't occur too often, and if something does occur very often, that you vary how much dopamine you experience with each engagement in that activity. Well, dopamine is unique among chemicals in the brain because dopamine, unlike a lot of chemicals in the brain, works through what are called G-protein-coupled receptors. And for those of you that are about to pass out from the amount of detail, just hang in there with me, it's really not complicated. There are two ways that neurons can communicate, or mainly two ways. There are a third and a fourth, but mostly neurons communicate by two modes. One is what we call fast electrical synapses, ionotropic conduction, all right? You don't need to know what that means, but basically one neuron activates another neuron and little holes open up in that neuron and ions rush in.

There are a lot of myths about the molecule dopamine; we often hear about so-called dopamine hits. Today we are going to dispel many common myths about dopamine, and we are going to talk about how dopamine actually works. We're going to discuss the biology of dopamine, the psychology. We will discuss some neural circuits and a really exciting aspect of dopamine biology or so-called dopamine schedules. In other words, we are going to discuss how things like food, drugs, caffeine, pornography, even some plant-based compounds, can change our baseline levels of dopamine. And in doing so, they change how much dopamine we are capable of experiencing from what could be very satisfying events, or events that make us feel not so good because of things that we did or took prior. So I promise you it's going to be a vast discussion, but I will structure it for you, and you'll come away with a deep understanding of really what drives you. You will also come away with a lot of tools, how to leverage dopamine so that you can sustain energy, drive and motivation for the things that are important to you over long periods of time. So certain things, chemicals, have a universal effect, they make everybody's dopamine go up. So some people like chocolate, some people don't, of course, but in general, it causes this increase in dopamine; but sex, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamine, those things cause increases in dopamine in everybody that takes them. Things like exercise, studying, hard work, working through a challenge in a relationship or working through something hard of any kind, that is going to be subjective as to how much dopamine will be released, and we will return to that subjective component in a little bit, but now you have a sense of how much dopamine can be evoked by different activities and by different substances. So certain things like cocaine, amphetamine, I will put in the classification of bad; I'm willing to do that, and other things are part of life: food, exercise, if that evokes your dopamine, how are we supposed to engage with these dopamine-evoking activities in ways that are healthy and beneficial for us? How do we achieve these peaks, which are so essential to our well-being and experience of life, without dropping our baseline? And the key lies in intermittent release of dopamine. The real key is to not expect or chase high levels of dopamine release every time we engage in these activities. Sistemul dopaminic s-a dezvoltat pentru a ne motiva să supraviețuim. Activarea ei provoacă dorință, entuziasm, speranță. Fără ea nu putem depune efort. Now, what was interesting is after subjects got out of this cold water, that dopamine increase was sustained. And I know nowadays many people are interested in using cold water therapy as a way to increase metabolism and fat loss, but also to improve sense of well-being, improve cognition, improve clarity of mind. There's something really special about this very alert but calm state of mind that seems to be the one that's optimal for pretty much everything except sleep. But for all aspects of work and for social engagement and for sport, that highly alert but calm state of mind really is the sweet spot that I believe most of us would like to achieve. And this cold water exposure, done correctly, really can help people achieve that state of mind through these increases in dopamine that last a very long time.

Customer reviews

When we binge on pleasurable things, homeostasis means “our brain compensates by bringing us lower and lower and lower,” says Lembke. Each time the thing becomes less enjoyable, but we eventually become dependent on those stimuli to keep functioning. We spiral into a joy-seeking abyss. The digital world enables bingeing on a previously unseen scale because there are no practical limitations forcing us to pause. With substances, you eventually run out of money or lines of cocaine (even temporarily), but Netflix shows or TikTok feeds are indefatigable. Often you needn’t do anything: the next hit automatically loads on your screen. Radically changes the way we think about mental illness, pleasure, pain, reward and stress' Daniel Levitin, bestselling author of The Organized Mind

Why is it so hard for these authors to really trust that someone is actually interested in their topic and realize that they don't have to constantly lure the reader into stupidity? Yes. I am looking at you too, David Eagleman. And eventually what typically happens is they will stop getting dopamine release from that activity as well, and then they drop into a pretty serious depression. And this can get very severe and people have committed suicide from these sorts of patterns of activity. But what about the more typical scenario? What about this scenario of somebody who is really good at working during the week, they exercise during the week, they drink on the weekends? Well, that person is only consuming alcohol maybe one or two nights a week, but oftentimes that same person will be spiking their dopamine with food during the middle of the week. Now we all have to eat, and it's nice to eat foods that we enjoy. I certainly do that. I love food, in fact. But let's say they're eating foods that really evoke a lot of dopamine release in the middle of the week.Tengo un amigo que cuando escuchó por primera vez el podcast del neurocientífico de Stanford, Andrew Huberman, me dijo: “El tío mola mucho y es una pasada escucharle… una pena que se lo invente todo”. El comentario me hizo bastante gracia porque entendí rápidamente que lo que realmente estaba queriendo decir es que las explicaciones de Huberman sobre cómo funciona el cerebro son tan elegantes, sencillas e intuitivas que parecen ciencia ficción. Leyendo The Molecule of More (libro recomendado por el propio Huberman en uno de los episodios del podcast) he tenido la misma sensación ya que parece imposible que un único neurotransmisor, la dopamina, sea la explicación de tantos y tan dispares comportamientos humanos.