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Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten

picower.mit.edu

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Re: Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten

#21

Post by burnished »

childintime wrote: post #6

Makes sense, as Parkinson patients, freeze or tremble, which are both fear responses. I have seen my mother die of Parkinsons. I see a static (permanent) fear response as the straightforward cause for Parkinsons (combined with a helpful personality, which makes it difficult to just snap out of it). On the other end there were people close by that having seen war, took a life lesson from their fear response: you survi…

If I remember correctly it is not at all related to fear but a disfunction in the basal ganglia (which performs action selection). Think of it as more like an inability to select an action or to select just one from a range of related movements (not at the conscious level, but between the conscious decision making and the signals being fired down your spine).

Re: Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten

#22

Post by mirekrusin »

pyrophoenix wrote: post #14
sosodev wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strengthen your prefrontal cortex so "you" have more control over your urges. You typically do this with meditation.

Or you just set a firewall and block these 2 websites ^^ (Welcome to the club)

Your firewall seems broken.

Re: Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten

#24

Post by swatcoder »

abhisek wrote: post #5

I have a simple question. How do I control dopamine in "my" brain so that I can focus on "here and now" instead of HN and GitHub.

This may sound flippant, but one real option is to just quit doing so and not start again.

Maybe it's not obvious to you, but many of your real-world colleagues and role models don't visit HN or anything comparable. And they're still working at the desk next to you, and in the office you aspire to have some day. For all that stuff like this might feel justified or even necessary, it's not. And if you're finding that it introduces difficulties into your life or psyche, you are entitled to and capable of quitting altogether. You don't need to try to moderate it.

(And frankly, I personally don't even know what you're doing on GitHub so compulsively. I didn't even realize that was a thing, if that helps speak to how irrelevant it can be.)

Re: Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten

#25

Post by nashashmi »

klik99 wrote: post #23
abhisek wrote: post #5

I have a simple question. How do I control dopamine in "my" brain so that I can focus on "here and now" instead of HN and GitHub.

The irony of asking on HN how to not use HN

The best place to help you cope with an addiction are with the people who are confessed addicts.

But just because they are the best doesn’t mean their help actually helps.

Re: Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten

#26

Post by phren0logy »

roughly wrote: post #19
mountainriver wrote: post #8

Incoming cocaine therapy! Seriously though as someone who suffers from extreme anxiety I am eternally grateful for this kind of work. I would really like to see this combined with brain stimulation.

What’s interesting here is that in the drug treatment world it’s basically known that drug abuse is almost always a reaction to some kind of psychological trauma or disorder, and an awful lot of drugs (not just cocaine) play heavily with the dopamine pathways. The idea of dopamine as your brain’s signal that you’re safe fits about as neatly with that as can be. (Of course, like everything in biology, dopamine also do…

> in the drug treatment world it’s basically known that drug abuse is almost always a reaction to some kind of psychological trauma or disorder

This is incorrect. While this is true for a substantial number of people, I want to offer some resistance to the pop-psychology axiom that "everything is because of trauma." Not only is is unsupported by science, it has lead to an expansion of the definition of the word "trauma" in popular culture that's so broad as to be nearly useless clinically or scientifically.

Re: Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten

#28

Post by burnished »

190eH169ps wrote: post #2

can someone build a script that extracts the names of all this stuff like neurotransmitters, messengers, proteins, hormones and visualizes their amounts per metabolism around/at the time of the measured effect/observed behavior and or during the time of conditioning -- when stimulating (chemical, physical, psychological) measures were taken? a table to start with would be fine. please? all that lingo is above my pay-…

No, not really. It is difficult to measure because the tissue is delicate and the scale is very, very small.

You can look at my citation manager for some educational resources on the topic however https://www.zotero.org/i_o/collections/C2QRMIZE

But I would mostly recommend a neuroscience textbook. The following link is to the entry discussing what a neurotransmitter is so I think you'll find it immediately interesting https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10957/

In general neurotransmitters trigger a response in the target neuron by interacting with a channel embedded in the cell wall. This can trigger a change in the target cell if the triggered channel causes a protein to be released, or it can be an input signal used by the target to determine whether or not it should fire and pass a signal (through the medium of neurotransmitters) on to the neurons it itself targets.

If you are interested in the topic I strongly recommend creating a personal glossary for yourself. That textbook I linked has one I believe, and that ncbi domain has many other useful resources. There is a lot of simple sentences whose meaning is obscured purely because of a deficit of vocabulary, once you get some definitions down then a lot of medical texts really open up.

Re: Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten

#29

Post by voytec »

It's weird that there's no mention of adrenaline (epinephrine) and noradrenaline (norepinephrine). Dopamine is only a precursor for a broader chemical reaction. All three - with dopamine - play crucial roles in our bodies' stress response system, and definitely with fear reactions. Dopamine is just a neurotransmitter.

    tyrosine -> dopamine -> (beta-hydroxylase) -> noradrenaline -> Phenylethanolamine N-methyltransferase > adrenaline

Re: Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten

#30

Post by [deleted] »

bloqs wrote: post #17
abhisek wrote: post #5

I have a simple question. How do I control dopamine in "my" brain so that I can focus on "here and now" instead of HN and GitHub.

Dopamine levels don't reset until you sleep, roughly speaking. Don't do highly dopaminergic activities like using electronic devices that provide entertainment or communications

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