jfcage
Elite level shower taker
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What if I have anhedonia and nothing I can do gives me dopamine?In this guide I'll be explaining some basic neuroscience behind addiction and motivation. I feel as though most of this forum will know about dopamine, but I will be explaining it again and covering it in case you aren't aware - I'm not going to be quoting study after study, I've had to learn this shit at uni. I still recommend you to read the part on dopamine as it gives some interesting knowledge
Before I even cover dopamine, I have to give a little background on the anatomy of the dopamine pathway
Anatomy of the dopamine pathway
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As you can see within the human brain there are 4 dopaminergic pathways, ignore all pathways apart from the mesolimbic pathway (the blue one). Can you see how it start at the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and ends at the nucleus accumbens (NA). Remember this as I'll be discussing it a little later on.
Dopamine - What is it?
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain, it is the neurotransmitter responsible for motivation. Dopamine can be stimulated via drugs, food, sex, etc. It's been seen that when rats eat food the amount of dopamine in the NA increases. Dopamine being the prime motivator can be evidenced by experiments done on rats, the setup of the experiment was like this:-
A rat is put in a cage, within the cage there is a lever. Once the lever is activated the rat is given something which will stimulate dopamine, researchers then had recorded the number of times the rat had pulled the lever (frequency of lever). Idea being that the more the rat pulls the lever, the more they are "motivated".
So what happened during this experiment? The researchers had made it so that once the lever is activated an intravenous injection of amphetamine or cocaine was given to the rats (amps and cocaine are dopaminergic drugs and basically increase the amount of dopamine you have. Amps are the strongest for dopamine production). For 4 days the rats were left to drug themselves up and take the dopamine hits. Each day the frequency of the lever went up, this showed that the rats had more motivation to press the lever (stay with me here), due to them being rewarded. Researchers then after day 4 switched out the injection, now saline solution (that's basically salt water guys) was to be injected. Within a day or two, the frequency of the lever decreased rapidly. Rats weren't getting their reward, there was no dopamine. Thus the rats had no motivation to pull the lever - sounds fairly obvious.
In another experiment the researchers had then setup the same sort of lever injection setup, but this time a dopamine antagonist (something which blocks dopamine) was used the rats again had no reward and thus lever frequency was low. This had essentially shown that the mesolimbic pathway was the thing responsible for motivation.
Reward vs reinforcement
This question was raised during another experiment with rats. This time researchers had hooked up some electrodes to the brains of these rats, the electrode was in the reticular formation area, they would shock these rats via the rats pressing the lever and record the effects it had on their attention. However one rat enjoyed the electrical shocks, the rat would be compelled and come back to the researchers to get another shock. Researchers were baffled by this, it turns out the electrode in that particular rat was hooked to the VTA (look at dopaminergic diagram). This rat would press the lever on purpose to get electrical stimulation of the VTA.
This had again been another piece of evidence that the dopaminergic system was a huge driver in motivation and behaviour.
Now these findings raise the question, do the rats take pleasure in the dopamine? We only INFER that rats enjoy things like eating food (dopamine spikes) because humans do. We don't know for sure if they enjoy the food, we've tried to measure rat happiness by looking at stuff like facial expressions but again that measurement is highly subjective.
Thus we don't use the term "reward", a reward suggests there is pleasure as well as ambiguity if said reward will lead to an increased likelihood of repetitive behaviour e.g. pulling the lever .
Thus we use the term reinforcement, reinforcement is objective, it depends on the stimulus/situation to elicit a certain behaviour and does not imply pleasure.
Okay we've covered the basics, dopamine is the prime motivator and rats do shit to stimulate certain areas of their brain e.g. VTA. How does this link to addiction?
An addiction is defined by COMPULSIVE substance taking - I.E. You aren't having fun, you're just doing the substance for the sake of it. As well as a few other characteristics. All illegal drugs which are addictive increase the concentration of dopamine found within the NA, things like alcohol, benzos, etc. They increase the dopamine in the NA despite being gabaergic drugs, they still stimulate the VTA which in turn will release dopamine from it's synaptic cleft into the NA. DOPAMINE IS THE PRIME MOTIVATOR BEHIND ADDICTION.
This sounds horrible, why is our behaviour/motivation/compulsions based on dopamine?
View attachment 1501065
Here is a graph I've made outlining the reason why. Without dopamine we would not be motivated to do a lot of things which are actually beneficial for us.
How do I beat addictions/encourage correct reinforcement behaviour?
This is where the science gets wonky, but should work. Firstly in the model I showed we had drugs such as coke or amps as the stimulus for increased dopamine. We can switch out drugs for something as simple as browsing looksmax. Reason being looksmax is addictive is due to the dopamine spikes, if you remember the rat study where when researchers swapped out the amps/coke for nothing, the rats lost motivation to engage in pulling the lever, the same principle can be applied to browsing looksmax. If for example you get dopamine spikes from reading posts, interacting with others etc. You essentially need to quit cold turkey, getting something like a website blocker would be a good idea. Remember how the rats felt 0 dopamine when pulling the lever and thus stopped, now with the website blocker you will get no dopamine from browsing looksmax. In theory curing you of your addiction, since you've made your brain realise that looksmax =/= dopamine.
To encourage good habits again using the rat model, e.g. encouraging studying more. I theorise using a combination of the Pomodoro technique and using a dopamine stimulant during your break. Your brain should in theory be able to realise the action (studying) will lead to a reward (dopamine stimulant e.g. a cig, a piece of food/chocolate). Obviously I am not encouraging smoking or anything, please ensure you pick a good dopamine stimulant when doing this technique.
I hope you enjoyed this post!
