Quotes & Sayings About Dopamine

The money buys the drugs, the drugs work harder and harder to trick your blackened dopamine receptors into giving a damn about living. At some point you make a choice: fight your need the rest of your goddamned long-suffering life, or fill your need until it disappears into the grave with you. — Jeremy Robert Johnson

Bring your dopamine or adrenaline level down by activating other regions of the brain other than the prefrontal cortex. — David Rock

There's another part of the brain that seeps dopamine, specifically just before those peak emotional moments in a song: the caudate nucleus, which is involved in the anticipation of pleasure. — Anonymous

Because what we associate with the idea of love is purely chemical. It can be broken down into scientifically proven phases: it starts with a dose of testosterone and estrogen, what we would think of as 'lust,' followed by the goofy 'lovesick' phase, which is a combination of adrenaline, dopamine, and a drop in serotonin levels - which, by the way, makes our brains behave exactly like the brains of crack addicts - and ends up, if we make it through phases one and two, with 'attachment,' where the body produces oxytocin and vasopressin, which basically make us want to cuddle excessively. It's science. That's all. — Cynthia Hand

Most people think love comes from the heart or soul. The heart simply pumps blood, so love can't be created there. Where is the center for what appears to be a person's soul? The Brain. And what is created there, Jilly? That's right
dopamine. What does dopamine do? Creates feelings of love and euphoria. How do we get our brains to create more? Drugs, massage, and/or sex. Boil it down and it's all just dopamine. — Kaya McLaren

However, repeating the experiments and expanding on them led the researchers to a different conclusion. While dopamine is involved in motivation or the pleasures of the hunt, that's not the only way we can feel good. Dopamine is not necessary, it seems, for enjoying sweetness, comfort, satiation, and calmness - research suggests that these pleasures are more strongly linked to the brain's natural opioids, or heroin-like chemicals, instead of to dopamine. And this has implications for the broader understanding of addiction. — Maia Szalavitz

What our grandmothers told us about playing hard to get is true. The whole point of the game is to impress and capture. It's not about honesty. Many men and women, when they're playing the courtship game, deceive so they can win. Novelty, excitement and danger drive up dopamine in the brain. And both sexes brag. — Helen Fisher

In neuroscience, our textbook showed how the brain scans of people newly in love look a lot like the brain scans of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In each case, your dopamine is suppressing your serotonin. — Daria Snadowsky

Of course, dopamine didn't evolve for crossing arbitrary lines on the ground. It evolved to release energy when you're about to meet a survival need. If an ape climbs a high tree for a delicious mango, dopamine spurts as he nears the reward. That tells his body to release the reserve tank of energy, which helps him do what it takes to meet his needs. He doesn't say "I did it!" in words, but neurochemicals create that feeling without need for words. — Loretta Graziano Breuning

Science has learned recently that contempt and indignation are addictive mental states. I mean physically and chemically addictive. Literally! People who are self-righteous a lot are apparently doping themselves rhythmically with auto-secreted surges of dopamine, endorphins and enkephalins. Didn't you ever ask yourself why indignation feels so good? — David Brin

Researchers have discovered that adolescents do not walk around with a defect that prevents them from properly assessing risk. B. J. Casey, a neuroscientist at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, notes that it's just the opposite: adolescents overestimate risk, at least when it comes to situations involving their own mortality. The real problem is that they assign a greater value to the reward they will get from taking that risk than adults do. It turns out that dopamine, the hormone that signals pleasure, is never so explosively active in human beings as it is during puberty. Never over the course of our lives will we feel anything quite so intensely, or quite so exultantly, again. — Jennifer Senior

Here's the thing about close combat in real life: It's almost always over in a matter of seconds. Not like in the movies, where your hero has the luxury to strategize and maneuver and grapple for minutes on end. Fortunately, when your life is in danger, your brain kicks in. Deep inside your brain this little almond-shaped gland called the amygdala sends out the signal to make your body start pumping out dopamine and adrenaline and cortisol. Time seems to slow, your focus sharpens, you suddenly start perceiving way more stimuli than normal. Neurologists call this tachypsychia. Everyone else calls it the fight-or-flight response. Cavemen who didn't have it got eaten by saber-toothed tigers. So I made a quick decision. I could either be incapacitated by a Taser, or I could put myself within the reach of Bondarchuk's fists. No choice. — Joseph Finder

The results of decades of neurotransmitter-depletion studies point to one inescapable conclusion: low levels or serotonin, norepinephrine or dopamine do not cause depression. here is how the authors of the most complete meta-analysis of serotonin-depletion studies summarized the data: Although previously the monoamine systems were considered to be responsible for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD), the available evidence to date does not support a direct causal relationship with MDD. There is no simple direct correlation of serotonin or norepinephrine levels in the brain and mood.' In other words, after a half-century of research, the chemical-imbalance hypothesis as promulgated by the drug companies that manufacture SSRIs and other antidepressants is not only with clear and consistent support, but has been disproved by experimental evidence. — Irving Kirsch

Dopamine makes up less than one percent of the brain's neurotransmitters. It's a small portion. Dopamine is released when people are happy, angry, stressed. So it's really hard to call this specific neurotransmitter "the pleasure neurotransmitter." — Carl Hart

Driving a car provides a person with a rush of dopamine in the brain, which hormonal induced salience spurs modalities of creative and critical thinking regarding philosophical concepts such as truth, logical necessity, possibility, impossibility, chance, and contingency. — Kilroy J. Oldster

For Abby, "friend" is a word whose sharp corners have been worn smooth by overuse. "I'm friends with the guys in IT," she might say, or "I'm meeting some friends after work."

But she remembers when the word "friend" could draw blood. She and Gretchen spent hours ranking their friendships, trying to determine who was a best friend and who was an everyday friend, debating whether anyone could have two best friends at the same time, writing each other's names over and over in purple ink, buzzed on the dopamine high of belonging to someone else, having a total stranger choose you, someone who wanted to know you, another person who cared that you were alive. — Grady Hendrix

That's what falling in love really amounted to, your brain on drugs. Adrenaline and dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin. Chemical insanity, celebrated by poets. — Tess Gerritsen

We all are addicts
...

Everything RELEASES dopamine! — Deyth Banger

People are attracted more towards bad things because being good has been turned into a boring duty. No adrenaline & dopamine rush, no rewards! — Saurabh Sharma

Dopamine can be read as the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain. — Naomi Wolf

I can give you high blood pressure just on the phone by criticizing you. On the other hand, I can send a tweet to somebody in China and give them a dopamine hit. — Deepak Chopra

After endless textbook readings and interviewing 'experts,' I still could not grasp the full concept of 'love,' the mystique of it, why people killed for it, or died for it. Even the experts were confused. Biologists said the phenomenom we called love was just a bombardment of chemicals that affected our brain: dopamine, which grabbed us the throat in the guise of lust, and oxytocin, which settled us down to the mundane complacencies of marriage. On the other hand, Behaviorists thought love was really the search for God. No one agreed. The thing most humans thought we knew about love, we didn't know at all. And all that we did not know was astonishing. Even more astonishing was what passed for love. — Kiana Davenport

This is also true in defining spirituality. The infatuation one feels toward another when one first falls in love is a mixture of dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine. This feeling is exhilarating and intoxicating and it brings joy to most people.

The fact one knows the chemicals are involved does not lessen the experience when one is with that person. But it does help regulate your emotions if you know that the person you feel for is negatively affecting you. Oxytocin is another example of a "love" drug found in the human body that brings a greater chance of long term sometime moments.

[...]

It does not matter if it is the chemical or not, the tantalizing excitement and astounding exhilaration of life long sometime moments makes one grateful to be alive and breathing. These events enliven us and make us feel transcendence and in turn makes one feel transcendent in the merging. — Leviak B. Kelly

Scientists induced Parkinson's in rats by killing the dopamine cells in their basal ganglia, and then forced half of them to run on a treadmill twice a day in the ten days following the "onset" of the disease. Incredibly, the runners' dopamine levels stayed within normal ranges and their motor skills didn't deteriorate. In one study on people with Parkinson's, intensive activity improved motor ability as well as mood, and the positive effects lasted for at least six weeks after they stopped exercising. — John J. Ratey

You know when you send a text message to someone and you don't get a response right away, you feel depressed? You send a text message to someone you really like and you get a response right away you feel happy? You feel happy, the body, it creates the chemical dopamine, the dopamine, it goes through your blood and you become addicted to that dopamine rush, and you associate that dopamine rush with the happy feeling of receiving the text, and that's why you got people sending 3,000 fucking text messages a day, right, we're not even paying attention to what we're saying anymore it's just like a, like a morphine drip, right, it's like a dopamine drip! HAPPY BUTTONS! HAPPY BUTTONS! HAPPY BUTTONS! TIME TO PLAY WITH THE HAPPY BUTTONS! — Tom Green

Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from ... from ... wait, what was I saying? — Bill Keller

Case in point: Warnings on cigarette packages can increase a smoker's urge to light up. A 2009 study found that death warnings trigger stress and fear in smokers - exactly what public health officials hope for. Unfortunately, this anxiety then triggers smokers' default stress-relief strategy: smoking. Oops. It isn't logical, but it makes sense based on what we know about how stress influences the brain. Stress triggers cravings and makes dopamine neurons even more excited by any temptation in sight. It doesn't help that the smoker is - of course - staring at a pack of cigarettes as he reads the warning. So even as a smoker's brain encodes the words "WARNING: Cigarettes cause cancer" and grapples with awareness of his own mortality, another part of his brain starts screaming, "Don't worry, smoking a cigarette will make you feel better! — Kelly McGonigal

I can't get any satiation. My brain is wired in such a way that I - in my research, I probably have a lack of D1 and D2 receptor sites. These are dopamine receptor sites, and satiation is a process that involves a cascade. — Nick Nolte

There are 2.5 quintillion bits of information added to the Internet every day. As a result, each time we access the Web, we are offered something new, a shot of dopamine: a like! a share! an email! a purchase! Our egos are bolstered, our nervous energy absorbed. While ideas can spark online, it's more often through face-to-face conversations, sketches in our source books, extended hours lost in a project or even in sleep, that ideas grow legs. — Christina Crook

Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates dopamine pathways in the brain more than does watching porn films. This — Robert M. Sapolsky

Six rats are thumping away at levers, ignoring food, drink, sleep, and sex. What's going through their little brains? A chemical known as dopamine, that's what. A lot of it. Dopamine — Hugh Howey

Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new - the proverbial shiny objects — Daniel J. Levitin

Each of our cells is a living entity, and the main thing that influences them is our blood. If I open my eyes in the morning and my beautiful partner is in front of me, my perception causes a release of oxytocin, dopamine, growth hormones - all of which encourage the growth and health of my cells. But if I see a saber tooth tiger, I'm going to release stress hormones which change the cells to a protection mode. People need to realize that their thoughts are more primary than their genes, because the environment, which is influenced by our thoughts, controls the genes. — Bruce H. Lipton

The solution, she elaborates, is for couples to do novel and exciting things together (to release dopamine and get the romance rush), — Neil Strauss

Love? Dopamine released in the brain, which gets depleted over time, leaving contempt. — Marisha Pessl

But it turns out that dopamine is a chemical on double duty in the brain. Along with its role in motor commands, it also serves as the main messenger in the reward systems, guiding a person toward food, drink, mates, and all things useful for survival. Because of its role in the reward system, imbalances in dopamine can trigger gambling, overeating, and drug addiction - behaviors that result from a reward system gone awry. — David Eagleman

Cynicism is popular because it stimulates the brain chemicals that make you feel good. It stimulates dopamine by making the world feel predictable. It triggers serotonin by making you feel superior to "the jerks." It triggers oxytocin by telling you who to trust. You pay a high price for these moments, unfortunately, because cynicism keeps you focused on problems instead of opportunities. — Loretta Graziano Breuning

Substances that can give a shot in the arm to the mesolimbic dopamine system have self-reinforcing effects, and users will rob stores and mug elderly people to continue obtaining these specific molecular shapes. These chemicals, working their magic at scales one thousand — David Eagleman

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains - cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I. — Peter Watts

Carol, I can't describe how you make me feel. Wait, no, I can - you make my mind release pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters and you've flooded my mind with dopamine. If the experience of snorting cocaine and getting so high out of my mind that I want to climb a telephone pole with my bare hands just to see if I can do it were a person, it would be you. — Aziz Ansari

Music gives pleasure because your mind keeps predicting what comes next. Each correct prediction triggers dopamine. You can't make good predictions for unfamiliar music, so you don't get the dopamine. But when music is too familiar, something strange happens. You don't get the dopamine either because your brain predicts it effortlessly. To make you happy, music must be at the sweet spot of novelty and familiarity. — Loretta Graziano Breuning

Complicating matters, adolescent brains are more susceptible to substance abuse and dependence than adult brains, because they're making so many new synaptic connections and sloshing around with so much dopamine. Pretty much all quasi-vices to which human beings turn for relief and escape - drinking, drugs, video games, porn - have longer-lasting and more intense effects in teenagers. It makes acting out especially tempting to them, and it makes their habits especially hard to break. — Jennifer Senior

Any kind of novelty or excitement drives up dopamine in the brain, and dopamine is associated with romantic love. — Helen Fisher

In accounts of men in battle, there is an incredible adrenaline rush from group-versus-group conflict. The fervor and passion of partisans is clearly rewarding; and if it's rewarding, it involves dopamine; and if it involves dopamine, then it is potentially addictive. — Jonathan Haidt

This," Alaric explained to Sarah in what he thought was a kindly voice, "isn't love you're feeling. Only dopamine. Because Felix isn't like anyone else you know. Being a creature of the night, he's new and exciting and activates a neurotransmitter in your brain that releases feelings of euphoria when you're around him ... especially because you know you can never actually be together, and he seems complicated, and perhaps even sensitive and vulnerable at times. But I can assure you: he's anything but."
"How dare you?" Sarah demanded hotly. "It isn't dopa ... whatever! It's love! Love! — Meg Cabot

Much of the early work focused on dopamine and we were really looking for rewarding sorts of effects and sure enough, we only found that. But you can destroy the main dopamine-producing structures of the brain and you can still get an animal to self-administer drugs like cocaine. — Carl Hart

New lovers tend to "lose their minds" and do all sorts of crazy things in the heat of the moment. One study showed that new lovers' brains have a lot in common with people on cocaine. Dopamine is sometimes called the "drug of desire." Too much dopamine, from being "high with excitement, — David Rock

Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment: the monotony undermines our dopamine and attentional systems crucial to our brain plasticity. — Norman Doidge

I have already discovered that it is useless to ask neuroscientists questions that lie outside their specialty. The dopamine guys know the dopamine guys, but they don't know the cognitive-processing guys. — Karen Pryor

Dopamine is a chemical released in your brain and your body when you sleep that paralyzes your body so you don't act out your dreams. — Mike Birbiglia

Reward systems, such as those mediated by dopamine, also destabilize during adolescence in order to allow for the creation of new attachments, behaviors, and goals. This search for purpose and meaning makes adolescents more vulnerable to good and bad social influences, — Louis Cozolino

Food is a lot of people's therapy - when we say comfort food, we really mean that. It's releasing dopamine and serotonin in your brain that makes you feel good. — Brett Hoebel

There are some lucky people who feel they experience happiness when they gaze at a cloud or walk on the beach but the rest of us only get that special tingly buzz when we've bought, won, achieved, hooked or booked something. Then our own brains give us a hit of dopamine, which makes us feel good. We don't need substances; we are our own drug dealers. The — Ruby Wax

The exaggerated dopamine sensitivity of the introvert leads one to believe that when in public, introverts, regardless of its validity, often feel to be the center of (unwanted) attention hence rarely craving attention. Extroverts, on the other hand, seem to never get enough attention. So on the flip side it seems as though the introvert is in a sense very external and the extrovert is in a sense very internal - the introvert constantly feels too much 'outerness' while the extrovert doesn't feel enough 'outerness'. — Criss Jami

A lack of dopamine makes your emotions harder to control or regulate. There are more feelings of sadness and even depression. Other symptoms can be procrastination, less motivation, lack of interest in life, different sleeping patterns, restless leg syndrome, mood swings, fatigue, feelings of guilt or despair, a bad memory, lower focus, addiction to caffeine or other substances, or obesity. — V. Noot

Even having saved the world doesn't make me feel good about myself. Perhaps it's something you get habituated to; each new world-saving moment has to be bigger and better than the last to give you that same dopamine and serotonin kick. Maybe heroes are just junkies. — Charlie Human

Research from Denis Dutton, Brian Boyd, V.S. Ramachandran, William Hirstein and E.O. Wilson, among many others, is clear on the subject: we are enticed by forms, shapes, rhythms and movements that are useful to our existence. We find Vermeer's "The Girl with the Pearl Earring," beautiful, for example, because her face is symmetrical, a clue to her strong immune system2. As the neuroscientist Eric Kandel suggests in The Age of Insight, we are fascinated by Gustav Klimt's Judith because "at a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. — Anonymous

Why does chronic self-administration of cocaine reduce the density of dopamine receptors? It's a simple matter of brain economics. The brain is accustomed to a certain level of dopamine activity. If it is flooded with artificially high dopamine levels, it seeks to restore the equilibrium by reducing the number of receptors where the dopamine can act. This mechanism helps to explain the phenomenon of tolerance, by which the user has to inject, ingest, or inhale higher and higher doses of a substance to get the same effect as before. — Gabor Mate

What draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way. — Lisa Cron

Every page refresh promised the little dopamine kick that came from the shock of the new. Meanwhile, — Dexter Palmer

Bending his head, Kai pressed his lips to her knuckles. The plating had no nerve endings, and yet the touch sent a tingle of electricity along her arm.
"Cinder?"
"Mm?"
He lifted his gaze. "Just to be clear, you're not using your mind powers on me right now, are you?"
She blinked. "Of course not."
"Just checking."
Then he slid his arms around her waist and kissed her.
Cinder gasped, pressing her palms against his chest. Kai pulled her closer.
Seconds later, her brain began registering all the new chemicals flooding her system. INCREASED LEVELS OF DOPAMINE AND ENDORPHINS, REDUCED AMOUNTS OF CORTISOL, ERRATIC PULSE, RISING BLOOD PRESSURE ...
Leaning into him, Cinder sent the messages away. Her hands tentatively made their way to his shoulders, before stringing around his neck. — Marissa Meyer

When the eyes of a woman that a man finds attractive look directly at him, his brain secretes the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine - but not when she looks elsewhere. — Daniel Goleman

Pornography causes release of adrenaline from an area in the brain called the locus coeruleus, and this makes the heart race in those who view, or even anticipate, viewing pornography. The sexual pleasure of pornography may be partially caused by release of dopamine from the ventral tegmental area, and this stimulates the nucleus accumbens, one of the key pleasure centers of the brain. — Donald L. Hilton Jr.

Freshly sprung from my monogamous LTR, I had no idea how vulnerable I would be to the onslaught of chemicals your brain releases when you're attracted to someone. These chemicals are responsible for every single people-in-love-are-crazy-fools song, movie plot, and Shakespearean drama ever written. They stimulate the same area of the brain that lights up when you snort a fat rail of cocaine. This state of mind, limerence, is a biological relative of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you are an addict, or perhaps have the sort of low-dopamine, low-serotonin brain soup best served with a side of SSRIs, you are perhaps more sensitive to the mind-altering power of limerence. And if you are a romantic, you are perhaps more likely to label this heady, overwhelming sensation love. Being a low-serotonin addict with romantic tendencies, I had to experience many crashed-and-burned affairs to understand that for me, love really was a drug. — Michelle Tea

We get one of these little pings on our smartphones, and we get a little hit of dopamine as well. We get excited. We feel anticipation. As we feel this, we want it more and more. So we spend more and more time looking at our phones. — Kim Stolz

The moment of the print button for biology is nearing. Effectively, this could also mean that in a not-too-distant future, smart pharmacology will permit us to receive a continuous supply of antidepressants or neuroenhancers every time our dopamine level drops. — Nayef Al-Rodhan

When I am fully immersed in my work of nourishing humanity, it fills my head with all kinds of feel-good chemicals, such as endorphins, serotonin and dopamine. Problems occur during the brief intervals between the finishing of one work and the beginning of another. During these intervals, my biology starts to get filled with stress hormones cortisol and adrenalin, that worsens my OCD. That is why, I can't sit still even a day after I finish writing a book. Because if I do, my OCD begins to suffocate me inside my head. Hence, as soon as I deliver a work, I have to start working on my next scientific literature. — Abhijit Naskar

You start doing the addictive behavior to feel good and then your receptors get overloaded with dopamine, then you stop doing the addictive thing and some of the receptors have shut down and you don't have enough dopamine to feel good. So then you feel bad and go back to the addictive behavior to get more dopamine. The strange thing is that it works with what we think of as uppers and downers and whatever you call gambling - sidewaysers. — Bill Nye

There's all kinds of reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another: Timing is important. Proximity is important. Mystery is important. You fall in love with somebody who's somewhat mysterious, in part because mystery elevates dopamine in the brain, probably pushes you over that threshold to fall in love. — Helen Fisher

To give a dopamine kick and create desire, offer a reward. To give a norepinephrine kick and create tension, take something away. — Oren Klaff

Destructive Abundance is what I call the result of this imbalance. It is what happens when selfish pursuits are out of balance with selfless pursuits. When the levels of dopamine-incentivized behaviors overwhelm the social protections afforded by the other chemicals. When protecting the results is prioritized above protecting those who produce the results. Destructive Abundance happens when the players focus almost exclusively on the score and forget why they set out to play the game in the first place. — Simon Sinek

love: a chemical history.
...The second stage, attraction, is governed by dopamine and serotonin. When, for example, couples report feeling indescribably happy in each other's presence, that's dopamine, the pleasure hormone, doing its work.
Taking cocaine fosters the same level of euphoria. In fact, scientists who study both the brains of new lovers and cocaine addicts are hard-pressed to tell the difference. — Nicola Yoon

A mouse who fails to get the cheese tries again without kicking herself for being an idiot. — Loretta Graziano Breuning

Identifying a potential threat feels curiously good. You're like a gazelle that smells a lion and can't relax until it sees where the lion is. Seeing a lion feels good when the alternative is worse. We seek evidence of threats to feel safe, and we get a dopamine boost when we find what we seek. You can also get a serotonin boost from the feeling of being right, and an oxytocin boost from bonding with those who sense the same threat. This is why people seem oddly pleased to find evidence of doom and gloom. But the pleasure doesn't last because the "do something" feeling commands your attention again. You can end up feeling bad a lot even if you're successful in your survival efforts. — Loretta Graziano Breuning

A Happiness key: Maintain something to be enthusiastic about. Small/frequent goals = Dopamine hits that propel success. — Steve Maraboli

(known as the mesolimbic dopamine system) — David Eagleman

Many studies link addiction to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a cortical segment found near the eye socket, or orbit.5 In drug addicts, whether they are intoxicated or not, it doesn't function normally. The OFC's relationship with addiction arises from its special role in human behavior and from its abundant supply of opioid and dopamine receptors. It is powerfully affected by drugs and powerfully reinforces the drug habit. It also plays an essential supporting role in nondrug addictions. Of course, it doesn't function (or malfunction) on its own but forms part of an extensive and incredibly complex, multifaceted network - nor is it the only cortical area implicated in addiction. — Gabor Mate

I had avoided writing about love. I had never sensed that rush and buzz that comes with love, the release into the brain of body chemicals, pheromones and dopamine - the taste of love to which I was becoming addicted, his spearminty tongue when we kissed, his male sweat, the outdoor vanilla tang of his semen. — Chloe Thurlow

While girls average a healthy five hours a week on video games, boys average 13. The problem? The brain chemistry of video games stimulates feel-good dopamine that builds motivation to win in a fantasy while starving the parts of the brain focused on real-world motivation. — Warren Farrell

It appears that repeated social rejection perturbs the normal functioning of the dopamine systems. — David Eagleman

[Texting] discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting's hyperimmediacy. E-mails take some time to work their way through the Internet, through switches and routers and servers, and they require that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you've got a recipe for addiction: You receive a text, and that activates your novelty centers. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you fifteen seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out More! More! Give me more! — Daniel J. Levitin

I used to be able to sit in a chair and for four hours straight in a very focused meditative way be in my own world without ay interruption. And now it's like your brain is getting so trained to check your phone, and there is like a dopamine release every time you get a text whether it's a good or a bad one. I'm really worried about what it's doing to our minds. — Brit Marling

Kuhnen and Brian Knutson have found that men who are shown erotic pictures just before they gamble take more risks than those shown neutral images like desks and chairs. This is because anticipating rewards - any rewards, whether or not related to the subject at hand - excites our dopamine-driven reward networks and makes us act more rashly. (This may be the single best argument yet for banning pornography from workplaces.) — Susan Cain

You work at a job, and you reach a certain level, and you're a little satisfied, and you keep going at it a little more, and you finally finish it. You go, 'Ah,' all your dopamine receptor sites are full. You're satiated. — Nick Nolte

Attention is the way social primates measure status. It is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins. — Keith Henson

Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to the neural correlates of belief. Dopamine, in fact, is critical in association learning and the reward system of the brain that Skinner discovered through his process of operant conditioning, whereby any behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated. A reinforcement is, by definition, something that is rewarding to the organism; that is to say, it makes the brain direct the body to repeat the behavior in order to get another positive reward. — Michael Shermer

Love is nothing more than elevated levels of dopamine, nor-epinephrine, and other chemicals. But the way Uncle Antionio's face lights up as they dance ... I wonder what it would be like to feel that. To let the chemicals of romance take over for just a little while. Then I remember that I am immortal and that my body doesn't work like everyone else's. Who knows if I can even feel love? — Jessica Khoury

The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick. Many addictions, too, are reinforced by the strengthening of plastic pathways to the brain. Even very small doses of addictive drugs can dramatically alter the flow of neurotransmitters in a person's synapses, resulting in long-lasting alterations in brain circuitry and function. In some cases, the buildup of certain kinds of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, a pleasure-producing cousin to adrenaline, seems to actually trigger the turning on or off particular genes, bringing even stronger cravings for the drug. The vital path turns deadly. — Nicholas Carr

What is love when it's not for dopamine? — Saurabh Sharma

You'd think people would realize they're bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great. — Daniel J. Levitin

Environmental cues associated with drug use - paraphernalia, people, places, and situations - are all powerful triggers for repeated use and for relapse, because they themselves trigger dopamine release. People trying to quit smoking, for example, are advised to avoid poker if they are used to having a cigarette while playing cards. Unless they move to a different area of town or to a recovery home, my Downtown Eastside patients find it virtually impossible to stop drug use, even when they form a strong intention to do so. Not only are drugs readily available, but everything and everyone in the environment reminds them of their habit. — Gabor Mate

movies?). By feeding a virtual "history" to your brain, it will trigger hormone creation, producing necessary dopamine to drive a particular action. In other words, it will grant you quick access to higher levels of possibility. — Vu Tran

When you eat your favorite food, 150 dopamine units are released. When you have sex, 200 dopamine units are released. But when you use methamphetamine, 1050 dopamine units are released - five times more dopamine than is released during sex. Even cocaine use only releases 340 units. — Ellen Hopkins

higher concentration of dopamine appears to lower skepticism and result in greater vulnerability to pattern detection; an — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

When people have difficulty achieving regular releases of dopamine through these kinds of socially accepted activities, they will often seek a shortcut. — Ray Kurzweil