Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Dopamine: How Neurotransmitters and the Brain’s Regions Work
    Dopamine: How Neurotransmitters and the Brain’s Regions Work
    Dopamine: How Neurotransmitters and the Brain’s Regions Work
    Ebook59 pages50 minutes

    Dopamine: How Neurotransmitters and the Brain’s Regions Work

    By Mark Daily

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This book consists of two titles, which are the following:

    Book 1: What is dopamine? And how does it work? 

    Dopamine has been the topic of many debates and discussions among neuroscientists, clinicians, and analysts. It has been controversial and fascinating at the same time. Dopamine seems to give us motivation to succeed, to exercise, to seek rewards, to survive, and to procreate. It rewards us when we follow our instincts and can be the source of addictive behavior. People with ADHD have special challenges regarding dopamine fluctuation and appear to frequently suffer from a deficiency or overdose. Thus, regulating such dopamine levels is crucial to one’s satisfaction and happiness in life.




    Book 2: There is a loop in life: We seek a reward, and we get rewarded with dopamine. This dopamine motivates us to seek more of it, and the cycle repeats itself. Such cycles can either be the basis of success and true fulfillment in life, or it can become a destructive pattern that leads someone to becoming dependent on fast fixes that turn out to be uncontrollable.

    In today’s book, we’ll discuss what those fluctuating levels of dopamine do to our brains, which effect they can have on migraines, motivation, obesity, drug addiction, or food addictions. We will also briefly touch on what dopamine fasting is and what you can do to exercise more control over your appetites and live a balanced, satisfactory life.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnonymous
    Release dateNov 7, 2020
    ISBN9791220218214

    Read more from Mark Daily

    Related to Dopamine

    Related ebooks

    Psychology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Brain Drugs

      Feb 18, 2017

      Brain Drugs
      1 min read

    • Article

      Taking Ritalin to Study May Change Brain Chemistry

      May 16, 2017

      For young people who don’t have ADHD, recreationally taking Ritalin may lead to changes in brain chemistry associated with risk-taking behavior, sleep disruption, and other undesirable effects, a new study suggests. Ritalin, the brand name for methyl

      2 min read

    • Article

      C Cellular Aging

      May 26, 2017

      C Cellular Aging
      3 min read

    • Article

      Mice on Acid

      May 27, 2020

      In the bowels of an animal research facility at Oxford University, mice are stirring in cages. Half of them have been given an injection of saline solution and behave like the docile house pet of your local fifth-grader. The other half have been give

      6 min read

    • Article

      Brain’s ‘Gatekeeper’ Decides Which Details Need Attention

      Oct 28, 2018

      Neuroscientists know a lot about how our brains learn new things, but not much about how they choose what to focus on while they learn. Now, researchers have traced that ability to an unexpected place in the brain. In order to learn about the world,

      3 min read

    • Article

      Neurons Never Quite Recover From ‘Pavlov’s Bell’

      Mar 23, 2017

      In the decades following the work of physiologist Ivan Pavlov and his famous salivating dogs, scientists have discovered how molecules and cells in the brain learn to associate two stimuli, such as Pavlov’s bell and the resulting food. What they have

      3 min read

    • Article

      What the Rat Brain Tells Us About Yours

      Apr 13, 2017

      A little more than a decade ago, Mike Mendl developed a new test for gauging a laboratory rat’s level of happiness. Mendl, an animal welfare researcher in the veterinary school at the University of Bristol in England, was looking for an objective way

      11 min read

    • Article

      Happy Pills

      Aug 7, 2022

      Happy Pills
      2 min read

    • Article

      How to Unlearn a Disease: Medicine’s Latest Cure Is Forgetting You’re Sick.: Medicine’s latest cure is forgetting you’re sick.

      May 14, 2015

      My father, a neurologist, once had a patient who was tormented, in the most visceral sense, by a poem. Philip was 12 years old and a student at a prestigious boarding school in Princeton, New Jersey. One of his assignments was to recite Edgar Allan P

      8 min read

    • Article

      How To Unlearn A Disease: Medicine’s latest cure is forgetting you’re sick.

      Jul 14, 2021

      My father, a neurologist, once had a patient who was tormented, in the most visceral sense, by a poem. Philip was 12 years old and a student at a prestigious boarding school in Princeton, New Jersey. One of his assignments was to recite Edgar Allan P

      8 min read

    • Article

      Why Do We Need to Sleep?

      Jan 3, 2018

      Why Do We Need to Sleep?
      8 min read

    • Article

      The New Science Of Forgetting

      Apr 30, 2022

      A BABY ZEBRAFISH IS JUST HALF THE size of a pea. A recent look inside its transparent brain, however, offers clues to the far bigger mystery of how we remember—and how we forget. In an experiment that yielded insights into memory and the brain, a tea

      7 min read

    • Article

      The New Science Of Forgetting

      Apr 29, 2022

      A BABY ZEBRAFISH IS JUST HALF THE size of a pea. A recent look inside its transparent brain, however, offers clues to the far bigger mystery of how we remember—and how we forget. In an experiment that yielded insights into memory and the brain, a tea

      7 min read

    • Article

      Brain Rhythm May Explain Why Sleepy Brains Forget

      Apr 9, 2017

      New research clarifies how sleep deprivation affects memory-making in the brain. Previously, researchers knew that depriving mice of sleep after the mice performed a task resulted in the mice forgetting aspects of that task. But researchers weren’t s

      2 min read

    • Article

      Reducing ‘Stress Granules’ May Slow Alzheimer’s

      Nov 21, 2017

      Reducing “stress granules,” gritty blobs of RNA that form when things like heat, viruses, or toxins stress a cell, may be a new way to fight Alzheimer’s disease. A slice of brain riddled with Alzheimer’s disease holds two unmistakable hallmarks: ball

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Dopamine

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Dopamine - Mark Daily

      Connection

      Chapter 1: What Is Dopamine?

      What is the definition of dopamine? What does it do and in what way? These kinds of questions have caused debate in neuroscience for a long time. A new study from the U.K. could have some of the answers.

      The word dopamine means very different things to different people. From drug addiction to Parkinson's illness to a Hollywood film, dopamine is a part of mainstream culture and also an enduringly interesting research subject in neuroscience. It has been part of over 110,000 research documents in the last 60 years but is still a source of controversy amongst neuroscientists. Attempting to sum up the function of dopamine in a brief chapter or book isn't going to be simple. I am going to leave a lot of research researchers dissatisfied and some totally mad!

      Let's start with the basics. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, one of those chemicals that is accountable for transferring signals between the afferent neuron (neurons) of the brain. Really few nerve cells actually make dopamine. Some, in a part of the brain called the substantia nigra, are the cells that die during Parkinson's disease. The functions of others, situated in a part of the brain called the forward tegmental area (VTA), are less well defined and are the major source of the previously mentioned debate, which is my entire focus as well. When dopamine neurons end up being activated, they release dopamine.

      One of the best-described roles for VTA dopamine nerve cells is in learning more about benefits. VTA dopamine neurons become triggered when something good happens all of a sudden, such as the unexpected accessibility of food. Most mistreated drugs cause the release of dopamine and this is thought to add to their addicting properties.

      However what about bad things? Do they trigger dopamine nerve cells? It's maybe even more crucial to learn when something bad is going to happen than when something good is; with predators or illness you typically do not get a second chance. Is dopamine associated with learning more about bad things? Herein lies some of the debate surrounding dopamine. Not all the nerve cells in the VTA make dopamine. Most research studies had suggested that the unexpected discussion of aversive or noxious stimuli like pain triggered the activation of some nerve cells in the forward tegmental area, but were these dopamine nerve cells?

      In 2004 Mark Ungless and coworkers at the University of Oxford published a paper in the diary Science suggesting that dopamine nerve cells were widely inhibited by aversive events. They used a painstakingly detailed approach to determine those nerve cells that were triggered or prevented by aversive stimuli and after that biochemically evaluated those neurons to determine if they truly were dopamine neurons. They did find that some nerve cells became triggered by aversive stimuli, but these neurons did not make dopamine.

      The findings were really clear but were controversial. They did not agree with other research studies on the role of dopamine, which includes some which revealed that treatment with drugs that block the action of dopamine could block discovering aversive events. Moreover, chemical measurements showed that dopamine was released by animals undergoing a difficult experience. If dopamine neurons are not triggered when finding out about aversive events, how is this dopamine being released? and why would blocking the impacts of dopamine prevent learning about aversive events?

      Ungless and co., now at the United Kingdom Medical Science Research Study Council, Imperial College, London, hypothesized that the devil may be in the detail; maybe the VTA is not a single, uniform part of the brain but is made up of functionally different subregions. Before performing their newest study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they returned and looked again at the literature about dopamine nerve cells in the forward tegmental

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1