Dopamine: Driving Your Brain into the Future | Daniel Z. Lieberman | TEDxWilmingtonWomen

Your

brain

is a curious thing, sometimes it does what you want it to do, like compose an email or find something to eat in the refrigerator, other times it is uncooperative and stubborn, refusing to start that important new project or staying away. stuck and ruminating all day. some negative thought that makes you feel unhappy

your

brain

is brilliant and rebellious it can be

your

best friend and sometimes your worst enemy the first step to tame this beast and get out of it all you can is to understand it and today I am going to tell you a secret important about how the brain works and, oddly enough, it starts with the seemingly simple distinction between up and down, so for a moment let me ask you to look down and what do you see?

Lise, your hands can be a pen. cup of coffee possibly a cell phone when you look down you are looking at what is called the peri personal space which is a space around you that is within arm's reach the things that are within the peri personal space are typically things that you own and control you use them enjoy them sometimes consume them when you look up, on the other hand, you are looking towards the extra personal space, the world that is just out of arm's reach, if you want or need something in the extra personal space, it will take an effort to get it , give me a small The amount of effort it takes to walk across the room to pick up a book from a table or it might be more to walk to the store to buy a bag of peaches or plan a trip around the world.

Interacting with things in extra personal space takes place in the

future

. because those things are not here they are imaginary they are unreal they are abstract ideas when our brain processes things in peri-personal space it uses a handful of chemicals that could be called here and now brain chemicals because they process things that are here in the present moment when we look ahead the extra personal space towards the

future

the imaginary the abstract and unreal our thoughts are coordinated by a single brain chemical and that is

dopamine

, it is the chemical of what you want now that generates a I wonder why evolution created these two such different paths, one for what we have and another for what we don't have, and the answer is quite simple for our evolutionary ancestors.

The well-known saying "you have it or you don't" could easily become if you have it or you are dead from a survival point of view and your brain is a highly tuned survival machine, there is a fundamental difference between the resources you have, such as food, water, reproductive partners and those who do not, and sometimes that difference was the difference between life and death now when we interact with the things we have we engage in consumed behaviors Ettore and that of course we refer to consuming eating and drinking but we also consummation refers to what happens in the end when we reach our goal the feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction we have gained when we interact with things we don't have, we engage in appetitive behaviors, we desire motivation and hard work, so let's start by taking a look to some of the here-and-now brain chemicals that you may be familiar with that are processed in the here-and-now.

The sensory experiences that we see here, the taste, the touch, the smell, here in the present moment, and the emotions are the same. We feel joy, pleasure and sadness, here in the present. The same goes for social interactions. We experience empathy, warmth, and simply the joy of being with the people we love in the present. That is the here and now. What happens to

dopamine

? What do we know about dopamine? Much of the early research that was done on dopamine was done by addiction researchers, and that's because this is the brain chemical of desire and motivation, and addicted people want and are motivated to obtain toxic chemicals that They are destroying their lives, so in this study scientists injected volunteers with intravenous cocaine and then measured the activity of a structure in their brain called the striatum.

It is a part of the brain that is rich in dopaminergic activity. Red and yellow represent high levels of activity and blue and green represent lower levels of activity. What you can see is that cocaine is a powerful dopamine stimulator within minutes of consuming the drug. The injected levels rise greatly and then, as the body eliminates the drug, they fall. Now scientists were not only interested in the objective measurement of brain activity, but they also wanted to know what their research volunteers were feeling. They wanted to know about the subjective experience. As they did this at each moment, they asked them to rate the level of euphoria they were experiencing and that is represented by the gray bars to the right of each scan, what immediately jumps out is this very close, very close relationship between the dopamine. activity and the level of euphoria based on this study and other similar ones, the pathway that dopamine cells follow through the brain was called the reward pathway and dopamine was named the pleasure molecule and this makes a lot of sense, dopamine rewards us when we do things that make our evolutionary success a little more secure when we get food when we are hungry when we win a competition score the goal in the soccer game all these things make our future a little more interesting and maybe a little safer and if you've heard of dopamine like many of you, this is probably the context in which you've heard of it as the pleasure molecule and like I said, it makes a lot of sense, there's only one problem and that's that it's wrong, It turns out to be a little more complex and a lot more powerful, so later researchers reasoned that it's highly unlikely that this circuit evolved to respond to cocaine;

It's much more likely to respond to natural rewards like food, so they designed an experiment in which they dropped food pellets into a rat's cage and then measured the dopamine response in their brain. In this graph we see a few seconds of time and each dot represents an individual dopamine cell in the rat's brain that is activated. The bars at the top represent the total number of dopamine cells that are active at each moment, okay, so we got the vertical line, we dropped a food pellet into the rats' cage and a moment later we got a spike in dopamine activation.

So far the pleasure molecule is good, but look what happens next look what happens if day after day we continue to throw pellets into the rats cage at the same time, every day we train the rat to wait for the There is as much apparent pleasure as ever, but the dopamine response has disappeared. Why is the answer that dopamine is not the pleasure molecule? Dopamine is the molecule of novelty. Only unexpected rewards trigger dopamine. The scientific term for this is reward prediction error as we go through life. you constantly make predictions about what the future holds, particularly regarding rewards, you open your wallet expecting to see $40 and there's $60 in there, you just made a mistake with your reward prediction and get a little hit of dopamine, let me give you another example : You're walking down the street on your way to work, you've walked down the street dozens of times before nothing has changed and your dopamine system is at rest, you suddenly realize that a new bakery has just opened. dopamine your future just got a little more interesting so you walked over to order a croissant a cup of delicious coffee you decide that from now on you're going to come here every day for breakfast and then what happens two weeks later? you are sitting in the bakery chewing your croissant nothing your thoughts are elsewhere all the excitement the excitement that came first has now completely disappeared we can express this through a simple mathematical formula the release of dopamine is equal to the actual reward minus the expected reward when the bakery was a surprise your dopamine system responded fully as expectations rose, dopamine went down and it's not just about bakeries and croissants, this happens when getting a raise, getting a promotion, buying a flat screen TV big, even falling in love and that sucks because dopamine feels so good we all especially love dopamine.

We like new things, we like to think about the future, we love ideas, but as soon as what we hope for becomes what we have, the dopamine disappears, does that mean we are destined to chase things forever and as soon as We catch them, do they escape from our hands? not exactly, but if we want to get satisfaction from the things that we have, we have to go down, we have to get out of our dopamine circuits into our here-in-now circuits and they feel different, it's a little bit more of a tactile experience that isn't always comfortable for people who love dopamine, but dopamine cannot give you satisfaction, any more than a hammer can turn a screw.

Dopamine can only say more, that's what dopamine is for, to maximize future resources, be it passion. Patience, perseverance and hard work required for scientific discovery, buying a new house or starting a new career, dopamine is there to bring about change in the world, it makes the world a better place, but if we are not careful, it can also destroy us. July 20, 1969. Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, it took a lot of dopamine to get there, but based on what we know about his life, it seems he had a lot of dopamine, in fact he may have displaced almost everything else when returned to Earth a journalist asked him what it felt like to walk on the moon Buzz Aldrin responded look we don't know we were feeling we weren't feeling what your emotions were while you were walking on the surface of the Moon fighter pilots Don't have emotions, he told a group of admirers.

Walking on the moon was just something we did. Now we should do something else, but how do you beat walking on the moon if you're on dopamine all the time? That becomes a very important question. Maybe you can guess what happened next: he started drinking heavily and soon became an alcoholic, married and divorced two women, and eventually things got so bad that he was hospitalized in a psychiatric inpatient unit, recovered, and He went on to do more extraordinary things but over a period of time that same chemical that elevated him to the heavens made his life a kind of hell so if you want to do great things turn on your dopamine circuits want to change look to the future motivate yourself cross bridges and be successful, but when you get there you will need to do something else, something that for many of us will be just as difficult, you need to turn off your dopamine circuits, let your tone circuits have their way and celebrate your success, connect with family and friends. and even if it's just for a little while remember to spend some time right here in the present moment thank you