Why Dopamine Makes People More Impulsive

Why Dopamine Makes People More Impulsive
knowingneurons.com

Probably educating people on how they are wired to seek things (a good drive when you are talking about going out and securing food/resources) and how to direct that towards healthy pursuits instead of unhealthy ones would go a long way.

Lots of pharmaceuticals can regulate dopamine in various ways too. The issue as it relates to impulsivity seems to be caused by a combination of dopamine driven seeking behavior and more primal parts of the brain hijacking decision making.

It is the combination of primal parts of the brain doing decision making with the brain's propensity for seeking that causes negative impulsivity, so that could be aided by increasing gray matter (meditation) and regulating dopamine (healthy seeking) but you can only do so much.

It seems like so much "crime" is really impulsivity, and so I often have thought about ways you can reduce impulsivity, but it always seems to come at the cost of considerably altering how someone's brain works, which not everyone is open to.

* animals that lose their dopamine learning mechanisms can still learn new things

* even when dopamine is there, sometimes the system will continue to respond to unconditioned responses that are learned and expected

* microinjections of amphetamine do not increase reward expectation - they increase peak of desire for reward - like when food is more tempting after not eating the whole day; sometimes a nasty salty taste is desirable in sodium deficiency, say

* system is computing value, rather than learning

* incentive-salience is a cue-trigged type of wanting; say someone else across the room lighting up a cig cueing your desire

* the cue becomes an attention magnet - the cue is very hard to not want to pay attention to

* the mesolimbic state of brain at a certain instant in time plays a huge role in amplifying responses to cues - hunger increases desire for food, repeated experience of drugs amplify the cue for drugs

* an addict is a person who will have a super strong dopamine response when provided opportunity, due to sensitization of cue-triggered want - even months after enduring withdrawals, acquired hypersensitivity may still exist

First: Stimulant drugs typically release or inhibit reuptake of both dopamine and norepinephrine. Dopamine actually converts into norepinephrine in the brain, complicating things further. L-DOPA, which is described in this article, is not a stimulant drug: it only raises dopamine concentration, and nothing else. It's the direct precursor molecule for dopamine.

Raising norepinephrine along with dopamine can create a focused and patient effect in some people (and sometimes a somewhat euphoric effect); raising just dopamine will generally create a euphoric, relaxing, reward-seeking effect. I don't know the entire pharmacology behind why that is. I seem to recall that DA and NE may be able to directly modulate each other.

Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine), another ADHD medication, has a higher dopamine:norepinephrine ratio than Adderall does (i.e. it releases proportionally more dopamine). It doesn't work for some ADHD sufferers, because they become too euphoric.

Second: Stimulant medication is also more about trying to maintain steady levels of dopamine in the brain at all times, rather than constantly or intermittently fluctuating levels. If you were to take Adderall just once per week, for example, you would probably not get a lot of chronic relief. Taking small doses of L-DOPA every day could maybe help some ADHD sufferers after a week or two (though this is mostly just a theory on my part), for example, but this can lead to psychosis and many other dangerous problems, so is highly discouraged.

Someone please feel free to correct me if I got anything wrong here. I don't have formal education in medicine or neurobiology.