Many of us would have heard of dopamine and probably like everyone else, refer to it as the pleasure hormone. What we believe to be true must go something like this – when we engage in certain activities, dopamine is released in the brain and we feel good as a result. As it turns out, we have been believing and perhaps repeating this truly held false belief to others. In the age of fake news, we are victims also of false science.
Kent C Berridge, https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/Research.html is an award winning (winning awards is a science in itself according to some thinkers) professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan. He does neuroscience research (I imagine, by inserting probes into the brains of rodents) to answer questions such as whether addiction is a disease or if addicts, like everyone else have control over their behaviour. Whether addiction is a disease is a very important question which answer would inform policy and law. He has shown (scientifically of course), that there is a difference between ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5171207/.
In a nutshell, wanting and liking happen in different parts of the brain and accordingly can be isolated phenomena. We can want something without liking it and like something without actually wanting it. According to him, dopamine is responsible for wanting and not liking. No, instead, it is when anandamide, a neurotransmitter, is released, that we experience feelings of ‘liking’ or pleasure. In a healthy, functioning brain, these things work in tandem. We want and so we pursue (that’s the work of dopamine), we get and we like (that’s the work of anandamide).
Can we be blamed for this misconception? The answer, I submit, is a resounding no. This is a very popular misconception. Most of us are not neuroscientists. We want to be well-read to be well informed. We have to be well informed to make right decisions for ourselves and our loved ones. What happens when, in our quest for information, what we read is merely a secondary source which draws from yet another secondary source? Parrots must be very intelligent creatures because they can parrot. Ferrets may not be as well liked because they ferret, fluffy, white bunnies out of their homes.
We are responsible people who lead busy lives, working to give the best life possible to our families. We cannot all be ferrets, not in every field. We naturally and understandably, rely on experts to guide us on the right path. The question is, who is an expert? An expert has expertise. From whence does this expertise arise? I submit, expertise is a result of training and research backed practice. Experts have access to and take seriously, the latest research. They are ferrets, not parrots.
Merely because many are repeating something, it does not become truth. By the way, the word, ‘Anandamide’ was derived from the Sanskrit word ‘Ananda’, which means bliss and other synonyms of pleasure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anandamide
The Brain Dojo
