Not a neuroscientist - but I think what irks me about the common pop-science explanations is that they use those terms to establish a boundary between desirable and undesirable behaviours - but do so in a way that feels sort of arbitrary and dishonest.

I think when describing desirable behaviours or activities, we tend to use a more "cognitive" vocabulary that emphasizes a person as a thinking individual, capable of freely making decisions: Thoughts, feelings, memories, motivations, the self, etc.

Whereas when describing unwanted or unhealthy behaviours, we use biological or neurological vocabulary: Hormones, neurotransmitters, neural pathways, dopamine, opioids, the brain etc. [1]

This can create an impression as if those two sets of concepts belonged to completely separate worlds - where one is strongly associated with desirable effects and the other with undesirable ones. This seems very odd as both are simply different perspectives on the same thing after all.

It's sort of as if some highly nontechnical person was really fond of their car - as a magical device that lets them travel quickly and impress others - but believed we'd all be better off without batteries, fuel pumps or catalytic converters as those seem to cause nothing but trouble.

[1] The two big exceptions I can think of are advertising (where unhealthy behaviours are described using the cognitive vocabulary) and research on animals (where any kind of animal behaviour is described using the biological vocabulary).

The fact that the concept "dopamine" shares a name with a neurotransmitter is imho not that relevant and will over time just turn into an etymological curiosity. It would be better if it was named less confusingly, but that's not how language works.

> Why does this matter? Can’t this just be chalked up to lack of media sophistication, and pop psychology misunderstanding the nuance? In fact, when people such as Simon Sinek, the author and consultant whose viral video blames dopamine for millennial's problems bring up neuroscience, they are using a clever strategy to manipulate us. Mr. Sinek is not a neuroscientist, and has not studied or researched the complexity of this aspect of our brain. But, he knows something you don’t: mentioning neuroscience is a great way to convince people you are more knowledgeable about something, and to make your arguments more convincing. This effect was recently demonstrated by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, who showed that use of irrelevant references to brain science was an effective way to lure people into thinking that complex phenomena are simple, and easily explained by, well, the brain.

> People’s problems are never simple. And when a person does a thing over and over, even when the behavior is causing problems, there are a great many complex reasons behind that behavior. When we offer the reductively simple answer of “because dopamine,” it distracts us from the person. It is the person who learns, and dopamine is merely a factor, one factor among many, in the learning. When we encourage people who are watching too much porn, using the cell phone while driving, or looking at Facebook every two minutes, to blame their problems on dopamine, we teach them to externalize the problem, and blame it on dopamine. Instead, if we focus on the learning, and the salience aspects of these process, it helps us to draw people’s attention back to their own behaviors, their own motivations, and the meaning that they (and their religious or social background) have given to this behavior or experience. It helps us to put people back in the driver’s seat of their life. So please, let’s start talking about people, rather than irrelevant neurochemicals.

I can imagine that remembering that your brain chemistry is part of what causes the compulsion is helpful because it takes some pressure off seeing the addiction as a character flaw.

But beyond just being a synonym for ‘brain chemistry’, can you say what the concept of ‘dopamine’ is doing for you?

Particularly when it laughs off the entire concept of individuals feeling their own dopamine levels before describing a series of commonly prescribed drugs to inhibit or encourage it... The author can't imagine people noticing the effects of their own psychs?

I agree the article wasn't great, but that line was clearly saying that the subjective experience of "feeling a dopamine rush" isn't at all evidence of a dopamine rush, since we have no idea what the individual neurotransmitters feel like in our brain (unless we've been somehow trained to recognize them, perhaps, through very controlled experiments with dopamine inhibitors).

Saying "oh I know dopamine must be important because I can feel it" is, indeed, absurd.

We can feel a rush. We can feel desire. We can feel satiation. And perhaps we have been told that these things relate to dopamine. So now we say we can feel dopamine. This doesn't add more evidence that it is dopamine.

As far as the other three things (caffeine, sugar, adrenaline) I think the argument is we have a better understanding and direct experience of those vs. dopamine. You can drink a cup of coffee and feel obviously caffeinated day-and-night difference from pre-coffee, but you cannot drink a cup of XYZ and feel obviously dopamined.

There are definitely some obvious commonalities among the feelings produced by dopaminergic drugs as well which are similar to the feelings I naturally experience when working on a big project.

Indeed, but I guess what I'm saying is that the feeling you experience isn't further evidence that it's serotonin.

Your connection between the feeling and it being serotonin is purely based on the studies that have been done. Those studies are the evidence. The qualitative feeling we get doesn't add to the body of evidence.

That is what the original author was arguing against. People arguing with her online saying "I feel a dopamine rush, therefore it's dopamine that I'm experiencing. You can't tell me it's some other neurotransmitter."

FWIW the best way to get a feeling for what serotonin feels like is doing MDMA since it dumps massive amounts of serotonin out. It dumps plenty of dopamine too - it wouldn't be nearly as fun without that - but the unique "rolly" feeling is very attributable to serotonin.

Not advising people take MDMA just to figure out what serotonin feels like, but for those who have it's very helpful to sort of "recognize" what different neurotransmitters feel like

Adrenaline is one that is more common for me, and impossible to mistake. I can literally taste it.

The distinction here I think is that adrenaline is equivocal and really is just synonymous with "rush" because we've attributed the rush to adrenaline. But it could be another example of the same error and thus something we ought not, strictly speaking, say if our aim is to be accurate.

I also don't think the way "dopamine" is used is quite the same as "adrenaline". The former feels like it's being used in a more technical and explanatory way.

You may be confusing theory with practical considerations.

Human beings desire to know the truth, at least by nature. What you're describing is an inaccurate, even false belief that happens to make it easier to cope with something by making something an easy scapegoat. It allows you to blame something perceived as external and impersonal which allows you to put some distance between you and the urge.

There's nothing special about calling this thing "dopamine". Classically, the passions are bodily urges that could be out of whack in some way (either excessive or insufficient or inappropriate), often through habituation or lack thereof, but possibly also made more likely through temperament. Failing to satisfy an excessive or inappropriate urge won't kill you (satisfaction might), and knowing that already grants you power over it because its urgency is now seen as a kind of bluff.

> Perhaps it is human nature to try to solve complex issues by reducing the problem to something that can be explained to a lay person, even if such explanations are incorrect.

Reductionism destroys the truth by eliminating everything it cannot explain and by representing what remains in terms of some desired language. It is a rationalization through preconception rather than explanation.