Sometimes dubbed the ‘pleasure chemical’, dopamine is often wildly misunderstood. Nikolay Kukushkin delves into what the much-discussed neurotransmitter really does to our brains.
Our brains are amazingly useful things. But it seems that something’s broken in our relationship with them.
As humans, we often feel that we are at war with ourselves. We want what we cannot have and need what we don’t want. We get addicted to bad things and lose interest in good things. We ruminate, we obsess, we snap, we regret. It is as if we are always trying to get to some fuller, better, more complete, more natural version of our lives and never quite get there.
Why are we so misaligned with our own brains? It turns out a lot of it has to do with a special but often misunderstood neurotransmitter called dopamine. It is dopamine that is the main tool our bodies use to drive us to look for more.
By Nikolay Kukushkin
