When you see headlines (or hear podcasters) talk about dopamine and other neurotransmitters, remember that neurotransmitters are merely signaling molecules.
The correct way to interpret this study is that dopamine is part of the signaling chain involved in fear extinction. The specific details of where, how, and when that dopamine moves through the brain are important.
The wrong way to interpret these studies is to think of dopamine as a "level" within the brain that goes up and down. Resist the urge to assume that taking a dopamine-modulating drug will result in this specific outcome.
Dopamine response within the brain is very complicated and region dependent. When encoding aversive stimuli (things you learn to avoid) there is evidence that dopamine signaling decreases in some brain areas while it increases in others: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462...
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Don't fall for the trap of thinking that dopamine does just one or two things in the brain.
agumonkey 3 hours ago [-]
I assume that some process also evaluate the memory patterns associated with a stimuli/concept and then adjust the signals emitted after exposure ?
I'm very very interested in this topic (I have some issues on that front) so if anyone knows books about neurology regarding trauma. Feel free to suggest me books or articles. Thanks
keybored 16 hours ago [-]
Turned out that people learning about <scientific thing existing> just lead to them making a fetish out of it, like it’s discrete switch in their brain that gets bumped when they eat a donut.
I wonder what even the point is.
procaryote 4 hours ago [-]
We should figure out which chemical makes them behave like that and make pills against it!
bravetraveler 14 hours ago [-]
I wonder what even the point is.
To either sell junk or believe '$problems' are one purchase/dance/act away from resolution, matter of perspective. Folks want things, others want to take advantage.
Not to be completely dismissive, placebo/mysticism/whatever can work
gsf_emergency 13 hours ago [-]
However.
>Not to be completely dismissive
A whole series of essays based on the above, dismissing <deep learning>, <venture capital>, <LLM>, <blockchain>, <compute-based consumer platforms>,
Remains to be written!
dopaminergic take: who doesn't want to take on journeys of discovery fuelled by other people's (even entire GDPs-worth of?) time and money :)?
just have to hope that the details turn out to be much more interesting (wit-sharpening) than the premise, heh
aaroninsf 14 hours ago [-]
You're 100% right,
and,
I can say that my own experience is that correlating my own exposure to stimuli I have found fear-inducing, while on dopamine-modulating drugs,
has proven highly efficacious in overcoming those fears.
No A/B, results may vary, etc.,
but personally I have had life-changing results.
wyan 1 hours ago [-]
What types of dopamine-modulating drugs are we talking about, if it's ok to ask?
aaroninsf 14 hours ago [-]
If one were to assume—which I recognize we certainly can't—that there was in fact some sort of causality here,
one interpretation would be that some specific drugs operate on relevant aspects of (or modulate the behavior of) the stipulated systems in a manner consistent with the desired outcome,
which allows for a neat summary in casual language, regardless of the complicated specific internal mechanisms.
wizzwizz4 17 hours ago [-]
(The "brains are computers" analogy needs to die, but) it's a bit like saying "hard drive activity increases when a file is being secure-erased". Yes, but also, no.
sieabahlpark 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dboreham 16 hours ago [-]
Neurotransmitters are just "global variables" to the GPU. What the variable does or means is trained. Probably trained in the context of "I/O" signals. E.g. if the chemical also speeds up heart rate or breathing then that becomes part of the training data set.
So Dopamine can potentially "do" different things in different examples of the same animal, if environmental training data is sufficiently different.
Aurornis 16 hours ago [-]
> Neurotransmitters are just "global variables" to the GPU.
No, neurotransmitters are very local.
Dopamine exists all throughout your body, including your bloodstream. The dopamine in one location is uncoupled from the dopamine in another location. The dopamine in your bloodstream can't get into your brain. Dopamine within the brain doesn't spill over into entirely different regions of the brain.
shemtay 16 hours ago [-]
is it not true though that activity/threshholds of dopamine synapses can be globally or semi-globally up and down regulated?
dayvigo 7 hours ago [-]
No, activity and expression are always local. Exclusively. There are no global levers.
loa_in_ 15 hours ago [-]
Not true. Down/up regulation happens in areas where (sometimes called) psychoactive substances and/or regulatory nervous signals reach. Substances that cross blood brain barrier still might not reach areas due to lowered blood flow or tissue damage.
abhisek 19 hours ago [-]
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.
Aurornis 16 hours ago [-]
You'll get a lot of pop-science answers when you ask about dopamine. The less popular truth is that focus and self-discipline can't be reduced to a single chemical. It's not as simple as a level in your brain that goes up and down.
Side note: ADHD is more than just dopamine, too. The stimulant medications used for ADHD have strong norepinephrine activity. There are non-stimulant ADHD medications that act on norepinephrine primarily. There are even studies where some non-dopaminergic ADHD medications outperform stimulants in certain measures like memory by modulating adrenergic circuits.
The unpopular take is that you need to realize that "dopamine" is an abstraction for higher level behaviors. It's not "dopamine" leading you to be distracted or focus, it's a behavior that you need to train and develop over time. There's also a big emotional regulation component where it helps to understand why you're seeking distractions instead of doing the work. Is it to provide comfort? Avoid uncomfortable feelings that the work brings up? Perfectionism? Are you trying to recharge during working hours because you're not recharging outside of work properly? There are many angles that need to be pursued.
I would recommend starting with small steps. Look up Screen Time settings or plugins that will limit your time spent on HN if that's a problem. Start with a generous setting and lower it over time. If you slip, start again the next time.
Treat it like something you train. Start small, make a deliberate effort, and work on getting better slowly. If you expect to flip a switch and turn into the most diligent coder you can imagine, you're unlikely to succeed. If you set a goal to do 10 more minutes of work and 10 fewer minutes of HN before lunch, that's doable. Little wins will compound.
HPsquared 4 minutes ago [-]
Anna Karenina principle oft quoted from Tolstoy:
"all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".
Like with any complex system, there are a lot of ways for the system to fail, and the number of states considered "working properly" is much smaller.
corry 18 hours ago [-]
1. Cold plunge - high but transient (last for hours). I do it in the morning, after my shower - start the day off right.
2. Exercise - short-term: increases dopamine, serotonin, and a bunch of other good stuff; long-term: increases dopamine receptor density.
3. Caffeine - while doesn't technically increase dopamine, it blocks adenosine receptors which indirectly increases dopamine signalling. But habitual use blunts the effect.
Other less acute things are: good sleep and lots of sunlight esp early in the day.
awestroke 4 hours ago [-]
Cold plunge is good but keep in mind cold water immersion inhibits hypertrophy (but improves recovery time) depending on time since exercise, temperature and duration.
kubrickslair 17 hours ago [-]
I have found l-tyrosine also being quite helpful when taken occasionally.
lifty 15 hours ago [-]
Done occasionally it’s fine. It can lead to crashes and also anger or increased irritability. Things that mess with neurotransmitters can be hit or miss. A better long term strategy is to focus on fundamental things that improve the metabolic health of your cells.
One other “light” supplement that can dampen addictive behaviors or cravings is l-theanine.
aantix 18 hours ago [-]
Nicotine.
sokka_h2otribe 17 hours ago [-]
Be verrrry careful. 7 years and very very disregulated from nicotine. Getting better 1+ year later
munificent 16 hours ago [-]
Get away from screens.
It's hard to focus on the here and now when the here and now is the soul-deadening sensory-less experience of sitting motionless staring at a flat rectangle of pixels.
Go out in the woods. Get your hands dirty. Meet friends at a bar and laugh until your stomach hurts.
It's so much easier to be present in the moment when the moment is actually high fidelity and nourishing.
alganet 15 hours ago [-]
Screens are awesome. They are the heir apparent to the fireplace. A very old human tradition and very cherished.
Outside, right now, people stay on screens all the time. It's the same stuff. Why even bother?
Humans plan ahead. We look towards the future and the past. Not all the time, but a lot of the time.
This carpe diem stuff doesn't seem like the right way to approach the problem given our current technological society.
Also, I'm not gonna party just because someone told me to.
jajko 4 hours ago [-]
You do you, but lets say I don't agree with what you say at all. Quality of life and all. Since I do both sides its easy to compare short and long term effects and impact on quality of life and happiness, plus its trivial to look around and see exactly same stuff repeating all over with literally everybody.
Suffice to say parent is correct, and you are not.
aaronbaugher 15 hours ago [-]
I recently started doing a 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise, where you look around you and name 5 things you can see, touch and name 4 things you can touch, name 3 things you can hear, 2 you can smell, and 1 you can taste.
I was surprised how different it felt to consciously see and touch things. It's not like I'm walking around my house with my eyes closed normally, but most of the time things aren't really registering. Stopping to intentionally focus for a second on an actual object or a sound I'm currently hearing seems to sort of wake me up, bring me out of a trance a little. Not as well as digging in the garden, but not bad for a few seconds in the middle of the work day.
13 hours ago [-]
sosodev 18 hours ago [-]
Strengthen your prefrontal cortex so "you" have more control over your urges. You typically do this with meditation.
guntars 17 hours ago [-]
This was an interesting connection to me between meditation and neuroscience. Buddhists talk about the "monkey mind" that chatters incessantly. Well, that's the default mode network, part of your brain that is active when you're not engaged in a specific task, when you're thinking about self, others, past or future. A useful adaptation in our past environment for sure, but overactivity can be detrimental. The Buddhist solution is to mediate, to focus the attention on a singular thing and not be distracted by the chatter. That ability lives in the prefrontal cortex! It's able to override the DMN and it's something that can be trained by just exercising it.
astrange 16 hours ago [-]
Not recommended if you're depressed/in a bad situation because you can just disassociate from everything instead of fixing it.
enaaem 16 hours ago [-]
Any special kind of meditation that is recommended?
Or you just set a firewall and block these 2 websites ^^ (Welcome to the club)
mirekrusin 18 hours ago [-]
Your firewall seems broken.
shermantanktop 17 hours ago [-]
Maybe they are texting from the embedded browser in their car's infotainment system? Never underestimate the creativity of a procrastinator.
ipaddr 16 hours ago [-]
They just used a proxy.
justanotherjoe 6 hours ago [-]
"Ora et Labora"
z3t4 18 hours ago [-]
You can try forming other habits in order to break the feedback loop. eg. define a good habit and repeat it. For example, at the start of the day immediately start working where you left the day before, then after lunch break you can check e-mail and read the news.
bloqs 18 hours ago [-]
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
18 hours ago [-]
bob1029 13 hours ago [-]
Exercise for time with steady-state exertion has proven to be the ultimate focus supplement for me. Right afterward it is like a very powerful drug. If the exercise isn't at least 30 minutes, I don't feel anything. Somewhere around 38-45 minutes, the music begins to fade in.
My preferred steady state suffering machine is the Concept2 rower. I can keep an eye on stroke/min and cal/hr to stay within a very narrow band of exertion. HIIT and weightlifting are great too, but these are not as strenuous on the brain's "focus for time" circuitry. Lots of downtime and opportunities to get on the cellular device. A straight hour on the rower with the cruise control locked @ 850cal/hr is a totally different kind of animal.
klik99 18 hours ago [-]
The irony of asking on HN how to not use HN
nashashmi 18 hours ago [-]
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.
pessimizer 17 hours ago [-]
The best place to help you cope with continuing an addiction, but not the best place to get rid of an addiction.
If you want to get rid of an addiction, stay away from addicts and everything they produce. Stay away from their artistic creations, stay away from their complicated explanations of the world, and stay away from their gossip. Also, please don't study to become any kind of "drug counselor," get regular person jobs and normal hobbies. You're dying of romance, and you need to figure out how to love the world as it is.
zifpanachr23 15 hours ago [-]
This is good advice and it's worked for other things I've been addicted to.
I guess you can think of this as my retirement from Hacker News. Thank you kind stranger.
swatcoder 18 hours ago [-]
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.)
phkahler 12 hours ago [-]
Give yourself an orgasm right after doing the activity you want to reinforce?
Make an electroshock gizmo that hits you when your browser visits certain domains?
firtoz 18 hours ago [-]
Meditation definitely, closer to Vipassana variation
nashashmi 18 hours ago [-]
You love dopamine. You don’t love stress.
Advice: love stress. Enjoy it. Feel it. Just don’t ask for it.
RangerScience 18 hours ago [-]
Go see if you’re ADD/ADHD and get on meds (I recommend Dexedrine), then also “join” the neurospicey community spaces where people swap tips, learnings and observations.
Also always go for a walk, touch grass, hug a tree. Pleasant physical experiences are truly effective at getting you into the “here and now”.
19 hours ago [-]
19 hours ago [-]
seydor 1 hours ago [-]
It's amazing how many pioneering studies about the anatomy of memory engrams come from Tonegawa's lab (who is already a Nobelist on another field)
voytec 18 hours ago [-]
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.
> Dopamine is only a precursor for a broader chemical reaction.
No, dopamine is a signaling molecule that participates directly in this functionality.
You're right that it's just a neurotransmitter, but the relative pathways about how they're produced are irrelevant for this study. They looked at how dopamine binds to certain receptors in certain parts of the brain under certain conditions.
voytec 16 hours ago [-]
OK, maybe not "just a precursor" but still "just a neurotransmitter".
I've read "The Molecule of More" and as much reasonably looking material I could find on the subject to "understand" my ADHD and fight it w/o meds. And I still feel dumb. Could you please explain how dopamine "participates directly in this functionality"?
gbnwl 16 hours ago [-]
FTA: “The team showed that indeed they express “D1” receptors for the neuromodulator. Commensurate with the degree of dopamine connectivity“
There are receptors specifically for dopamine on the amygdala neurons. Dopamine molecules are released by the pre-synaptic neurons, travel across the synapse, and bind to these receptors.
Dopamine’s role in the nervous system is not simply an intermediate on the pathway to produce epinephrine or norepinephrine. If you thought like this you’d reach the conclusion that testosterone is simply a precursor to estrogen because the pathway to convert it exists in some tissues of the body.
voytec 16 hours ago [-]
The more I read and interact with people like you, the dumber I feel. Thanks. I'll read up.
fellowniusmonk 13 hours ago [-]
I gotta say that since doing beta blocker enhanced therapy I've basically wrapped up any emotional response to past trauma and can examine all that stuff fully without having to protect myself. Pretty great stuff.
hollerith 13 hours ago [-]
Which beta blocker did they give you (or prescribe for you)?
fellowniusmonk 12 hours ago [-]
Nebivolol.
justanotherjoe 6 hours ago [-]
I don't know why more attention here is not put in appreciating the headline. What a brilliant, insightful line. Simple. Abstract enough to apply to many things that you experienced just begging to be synthesized, but haven't.
vanjajaja1 6 hours ago [-]
I was thinking something similar, i know i'm going to build skyscraper high arguments that hinge on just this headline
elia_42 3 hours ago [-]
The role of dopamine in superimposing new positive experiences on past fear-related memories is interesting. I am curious to see the possible effects on therapeutic treatments.
mountainriver 19 hours ago [-]
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.
SequoiaHope 18 hours ago [-]
Well MDMA therapy is a real one and probably much more effective than cocaine for these purposes.
dns_snek 17 hours ago [-]
MDMA (or psilocybin) assisted psychotherapy to be specific. I don't think just taking these drugs has been shown to be an effective treatment :)
SequoiaHope 16 hours ago [-]
Yes I was referring to MDMA assisted psychotherapy, which I am a huge proponent of. However I’ve found these materials to be quite effecting at healing when taken conscientiously outside of a traditional assisted therapy session. Of course there probably haven’t been a lot of studies on this because formal therapy studies are probably easier to get approved, so I wouldn’t take the absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
pier25 17 hours ago [-]
Psilocybin too
roughly 18 hours ago [-]
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 does about a gazillion other things, too, so it’s not quite that cut and dry, but it rhymes, at least.)
Aurornis 17 hours ago [-]
> 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 not true in the professional world. People engage in drug use for many reasons, including pure recreation.
Trauma can precede relapses or bouts of drug abuse, but it's not a universal explanation.
There are a lot of pop-culture ideas that explain everything away as trauma. These are popular on podcasts, Reddit, and other social media websites. There are also types of therapists who learned to treat trauma and then try to apply that to everything. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". These therapists will try to reframe everything as trauma because it's what they know how to teach.
They often reverse engineer a traumatic backstory as an explanation even when one doesn't exist. You can find podcasters and therapists who will even claim that being born imparts permanent trauma that explains things long into adulthood. There's no evidence behind this claim, but it's convenient for therapists who need to find a traumatic backstory before they can address something because everyone was born at some point.
> The idea of dopamine as your brain’s signal that you’re safe fits about as neatly with that as can be.
That idea is completely wrong, though.
The study is talking about dopamine signaling in one specific location of the brain.
Dopamine is used in other locations in the brain to encode aversive stimuli, among other things.
Dopamine (and other neurotransmitters) don't just do one single thing in the brain. They have diverse effects all over.
Also, many of the drugs that people associated with dopamine actually have much broader effects, such as on norepinephrine (stimulants) and serotonin (cocaine).
There are dopamine agonist drugs that go in and very precisely target different dopamine receptors in the brain, activating them directly. Many people are surprised to learn that a common side effect of these drugs is an irresistible urge to sleep when first taking them, for example.
cluckindan 17 hours ago [-]
>> 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 not true in the professional world. People engage in drug use for many reasons, including pure recreation.
Drug use != drug abuse
phren0logy 18 hours ago [-]
> 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.
foobiekr 18 hours ago [-]
I had the unique experience as a youth in attending a school where a substantial portion of the school was funneled there by one of the many 1970s and 1980s troubled teen corporations that spun out of Synanon after it collapsed. This one specialized in drug addicts.
Almost all of my classmates (not me, unfortunately) were from exceptionally wealthy families and excepting one none of them ever mentioned any childhood trauma. Instead they were precocious partiers who got into drugs despite being underage and going to the nightclubs in the seedy part of town - no one at the time was turning away hot young women or gay(for pay or real) young men. And the club scene was a drug scene. It still is.
I don’t think trauma is actually at the root of almost all drug abusers. The only first class abusers (pot and alcohol in serious quantities daily) that I know at the moment grew up in perfectly fine suburban families and are in good, non-narcissistic/controlling/etc relationships with their families. They’re just addicts who can’t stop. One of them is going to die from it, eventually, given his level of alcohol consumption.
static_void 18 hours ago [-]
I would unironically say this is the how of how adderall works for me.
I am distracted from work by anxiety. With medication, I'm not distracted.
SequoiaHope 17 hours ago [-]
Indeed, I was surprised both at the fact that it literally makes me feel better because the drug makes you feel good but also that it calmed my brain down and let me access some inner peace. But also the focus modification is big and I learned so many good habits that now I need much less of it to get stuff done. I wake up and start doing my chores before I even have my first dose!
hirvi74 15 hours ago [-]
> it literally makes me feel better because the drug makes you feel good but also that it calmed my brain down and let me access some inner peace.
I mean, there is a reason why it's a controlled substance and is heavily abused all across the world. It works and it works well.
Though, I've been on it for about a decade now, and I have lost a large majority of the benefits it once provided.
gigaflop 18 hours ago [-]
Generic Adderall Gang here, and in hindsight, I'm surprised at how little of it I need to realize a much better headspace. Makes me wonder if all of that caffeine in my undiagnosed youth was saying something...
RansomStark 16 hours ago [-]
I'm worried about my caffeine intake.
ADHD diagnosed but never medicated.
I've been a heavy coffee drinker since i was a teenager.
I'm sitting at 13 double espressos today which is about average.
Lately the instant sleepiness post coffee isn't worth the focus, and I'm starting the think medication would be a healthier choice
hnick 13 hours ago [-]
Ritalin was a game changer. After the initial adjustment it just feels like it brings me up to normal, I'm not particularly stimulated (in fact my lack of wandering mind makes it easier to doze during the day), I just prefer coding to games etc. It feels like it unlocks access to natural reward mechanisms instead of chasing artificial feel-good rewards. I can't even listen to a YouTube video while coding when using it, which was a normal activity for me since my brain felt bored and went off on its own without it.
Just mentioning because curiously it almost entirely put me off caffeine. I still enjoy my morning coffee as a ritual, but sometimes don't finish it. If I have another then the side effects are severe, Ritalin massively boosts those - nerves, jitters, hitting the toilet. Not terrible or dangerous, but just interesting, and honestly caffeine never did a whole lot for me mentally so it's no big loss.
gigaflop 16 hours ago [-]
Take this with a grain of salt, but I use it as an ad-hoc benchmark: FDA recommended maximum daily limit on caffeine is 400mg. If you're regularly going above that, then (politely) consider whether you should be.
RansomStark 16 hours ago [-]
400mg is only about 3 doubles.
Thanks for the heads up
static_void 17 hours ago [-]
I'd be interested in your thoughts more here.
The problem with amphetamine is you pay for every benefit: focus now, lethargy later; energy now, anhedonia later.
But taking a small, consistent dose. Does that work? Do you feel you net benefits in life from taking the drug, discounting for withdrawal and/or tolerance?
andoando 17 hours ago [-]
In my experience, no. You just get used to it and it does fuck all. Maybe worse even. Adderall seems to take my creativity away entirely and I just feel like a zombie.
Theres a host of physical symptoms that come with it to that are not fun to manage: decreased appetite, dehydration, headaches, sleep loss, heart palpatstions.
I would say its far better to take it on a needed basis once in a while
dns_snek 7 hours ago [-]
Have you tried any other medication? Concerta/Ritalin, Strattera/atomoxetine, or any other non-stimulant medications?
gigaflop 16 hours ago [-]
> Focus now, lethargy later
IMO, that's always just been me. Now vs Later is hard to judge, though, because I tend to have "good focus" blocks of time, and "chill blocks". Exact timing depends on my overall weekly schedule leading up to a time period.
Also, I mentally classify different types of energy. Physical, social, and mental energies all have their different places in a day.
> small, consistent dose
For me, yeah, but YMMV based on brain chemistry and environmental variables. Since I use El Cheapo, I max out at 10mg 2x/day, but rarely adhere to that unless I'm planning ahead for it/have been on that roll for a while. This helps a lot with tolerance, especially when I have lazy weekends.
And from a personal perspective: It's a very simple drug to understand, which makes me feel at ease. Brain goes vroom, like an engine hitting a more comfortable RPM. Not every situation needs my full power.
hnick 13 hours ago [-]
I can't find it right now but I recall seeing somewhere that around 40% of ADHD patients reported better effects on Ritalin (methylphenidate) or dexamphetamine roughly equally, another 40% says both are about as good as each other, and the final 20% don't find either very effective.
In my personal testing the Ritalin was much better, dexamphetamine was more up/down and shorter lived. However I didn't really get a crash or lethargy with either, it's just the focus wearing thin (and yes, the benefits were real and massive starting for the first time in my forties).
According to my psych, both have been around 70+ years and are fairly well understood. Longer term therapeutic doses shouldn't be habit forming and tolerance is minor after the initial phase, there's no withdrawal effects and it's easy to forget to take a dose if your routine changes. My morning coffee is far more demanding in that regard.
Aurornis 17 hours ago [-]
> The problem with amphetamine is you pay for every benefit: focus now, lethargy later; energy now, anhedonia later.
> But taking a small, consistent dose. Does that work? Do you feel you net benefits in life from taking the drug, discounting for withdrawal and/or tolerance?
There's a reason these medications are supposed to be taken regularly at the same dose in clinical practice. Patients should not be going through cycles of taking stimulants and then withdrawing all of the time.
There's a disconnect between the way some people try to use stimulants ad-hoc versus the therapeutic modality. The initial burst of confidence, energy, and positive mood that comes from intermittent use is a side effect, but people confuse it with a primary effect. They can get into cycles of chasing it with dose escalations or taking it on random days while they exist below baseline on others. This isn't a winnable battle over time because the brain will adapt, not to mention all of those off-days start to add up and people around them notice the extremely inconsistent mood and performance.
Unfortunately, misinformation about ADHD is all over the internet. I recommend ignoring basically anything that comes out of Reddit, Twitter, or TikTok because it's really that bad. Take medications as directed and set yourself up for some stability. Resist the urge to play with doses, take excess doses on some days, or try to play tolerance games. These never work in the long term.
There's a simple heuristic: When you reach stability, you shouldn't really feel the medication. It should be background noise. There's a reason why young people who have been properly titrated on stimulant medications don't understand what the big deal is with their peers taking large doses (without tolerance) and then speeding around for a while. It's where the myth about ADHD people reacting differently to stimulants comes from. Proper treatment will settle to equilibrium and shouldn't produce overt feelings of being drugged or hyperfocused.
hirvi74 15 hours ago [-]
The one issue I have never been able to overcome is that the medications are completely ineffective unless they induce hyperfocus. Now, it doesn't take me a lot to get into this state. I could easily enter such a state prior to medication, though I often needed (and still need) some kind of fuel -- intense desire or passion, impending deadline, etc..
static_void 14 hours ago [-]
What do you think about this?
With XR, I feel less hyperfocus and more sleepytime disruptions. It's less strong so I take more, but it lasts longer so I get its effects when I don't need it.
I feel like IR is actually less amenable to abuse.
hirvi74 15 hours ago [-]
Been on the various stimulants for a decade now:
> But taking a small, consistent dose. Does that work?
Typically, no; however, it's context dependent.
> Do you feel you net benefits in life from taking the drug
There are diminishing returns overtime, but there is still some benefit to be had.
> withdrawal and/or tolerance?
Both are real and awful to deal with.
Is it all worth it? I tend to flip-flop back and forth a lot on this.
Nuzzerino 18 hours ago [-]
Give it about 5 years.
carlgreene 15 hours ago [-]
This is a really cool study—finally shows that dopamine isn’t just about reward but actually acts as the “all-clear” signal that lets the brain unlearn fear. By watching dopamine neurons light up when an expected shock doesn’t happen, and then using light to tweak that pathway, they prove dopamine release in the amygdala actively drives extinction rather than just tagging along. It’s exciting because it hints at new ways to boost therapies for PTSD and anxiety by tweaking that VTA→BLA circuit or D1 receptors
childintime 19 hours ago [-]
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 survive by being alert and by distrusting. They radiated a permanent state of alarm, as the enemy may come when you least expect it.
dayvigo 7 hours ago [-]
No, the pathology of Parkinson's Disease is dopaminergic dysfunction (the symptoms coming from this happening in the area relevant to planning movements, separate from areas that influence emotion or reward), usually driven by loss of dopamine-producing neurons. This is well-described by decades of research and tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers.
burnished 18 hours ago [-]
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).
Havoc 17 hours ago [-]
>extinguish fear after a peril has passed
Surprised that there is no mention to extreme sports in this.
Big "what a rush" moment right after the person does something extreme and survives. Big dose of adrenaline in there not just dopamine but the parallels seem striking
pessimizer 17 hours ago [-]
Also "Duper's Delight."
pgt 16 hours ago [-]
I'm still reading the paper, but dopamine rebalances neuronal weights, so I'd be surprised if it did'nt change fears and aspirations.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 17 hours ago [-]
Like saying a loud noise can cause an avalanche
190eH169ps 19 hours ago [-]
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-grade
xattt 19 hours ago [-]
I believe this may be called neuroscience.
ricksunny 18 hours ago [-]
Strikes me that parent comment wants to see a knowledge graph constructed. Could be done for a lot of fields, and would be effectively named for the field they describe, like 'neuroscience' in the example you illustrated.
K0balt 19 hours ago [-]
I’m sure the whole fold will fit into a cute infographic!
burnished 18 hours ago [-]
No, not really. It is difficult to measure because the tissue is delicate and the scale is very, very small.
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.
rom16384 18 hours ago [-]
Ask Google Deep Research, I'm sure it will do a good enough job
amanj3777 13 hours ago [-]
Great
isomorphic 18 hours ago [-]
This line in the article is horrifying:
> The researchers were surprised that when they activated VTA dopaminergic inputs into the aBLA they could reinstate fear even without any new foot shocks, impairing fear extinction.
That... seems like the first step in being able to literally induce fear without having to bother with pesky things like finding the subject's triggers. Although I suppose if one has direct access to the subject's amygdala, the point is somewhat moot.
I feel like this would deprive the FSB/ICE/law-enforcement officials of their entire motivation for taking pride in their jobs. Automate the paperwork, yes, but let the psychopaths have their fun!
XorNot 14 hours ago [-]
Torture is ineffective for information recovery.
Those organizations do it because they want to, not because it works.
The correct way to interpret this study is that dopamine is part of the signaling chain involved in fear extinction. The specific details of where, how, and when that dopamine moves through the brain are important.
The wrong way to interpret these studies is to think of dopamine as a "level" within the brain that goes up and down. Resist the urge to assume that taking a dopamine-modulating drug will result in this specific outcome.
Dopamine response within the brain is very complicated and region dependent. When encoding aversive stimuli (things you learn to avoid) there is evidence that dopamine signaling decreases in some brain areas while it increases in others: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462... That's just the tip of the iceberg. Don't fall for the trap of thinking that dopamine does just one or two things in the brain.
I'm very very interested in this topic (I have some issues on that front) so if anyone knows books about neurology regarding trauma. Feel free to suggest me books or articles. Thanks
I wonder what even the point is.
Not to be completely dismissive, placebo/mysticism/whatever can work
>Not to be completely dismissive
A whole series of essays based on the above, dismissing <deep learning>, <venture capital>, <LLM>, <blockchain>, <compute-based consumer platforms>,
Remains to be written!
just have to hope that the details turn out to be much more interesting (wit-sharpening) than the premise, hehand,
I can say that my own experience is that correlating my own exposure to stimuli I have found fear-inducing, while on dopamine-modulating drugs,
has proven highly efficacious in overcoming those fears.
No A/B, results may vary, etc.,
but personally I have had life-changing results.
one interpretation would be that some specific drugs operate on relevant aspects of (or modulate the behavior of) the stipulated systems in a manner consistent with the desired outcome,
which allows for a neat summary in casual language, regardless of the complicated specific internal mechanisms.
No, neurotransmitters are very local.
Dopamine exists all throughout your body, including your bloodstream. The dopamine in one location is uncoupled from the dopamine in another location. The dopamine in your bloodstream can't get into your brain. Dopamine within the brain doesn't spill over into entirely different regions of the brain.
Side note: ADHD is more than just dopamine, too. The stimulant medications used for ADHD have strong norepinephrine activity. There are non-stimulant ADHD medications that act on norepinephrine primarily. There are even studies where some non-dopaminergic ADHD medications outperform stimulants in certain measures like memory by modulating adrenergic circuits.
The unpopular take is that you need to realize that "dopamine" is an abstraction for higher level behaviors. It's not "dopamine" leading you to be distracted or focus, it's a behavior that you need to train and develop over time. There's also a big emotional regulation component where it helps to understand why you're seeking distractions instead of doing the work. Is it to provide comfort? Avoid uncomfortable feelings that the work brings up? Perfectionism? Are you trying to recharge during working hours because you're not recharging outside of work properly? There are many angles that need to be pursued.
I would recommend starting with small steps. Look up Screen Time settings or plugins that will limit your time spent on HN if that's a problem. Start with a generous setting and lower it over time. If you slip, start again the next time.
Treat it like something you train. Start small, make a deliberate effort, and work on getting better slowly. If you expect to flip a switch and turn into the most diligent coder you can imagine, you're unlikely to succeed. If you set a goal to do 10 more minutes of work and 10 fewer minutes of HN before lunch, that's doable. Little wins will compound.
"all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".
Like with any complex system, there are a lot of ways for the system to fail, and the number of states considered "working properly" is much smaller.
2. Exercise - short-term: increases dopamine, serotonin, and a bunch of other good stuff; long-term: increases dopamine receptor density.
3. Caffeine - while doesn't technically increase dopamine, it blocks adenosine receptors which indirectly increases dopamine signalling. But habitual use blunts the effect.
Other less acute things are: good sleep and lots of sunlight esp early in the day.
One other “light” supplement that can dampen addictive behaviors or cravings is l-theanine.
It's hard to focus on the here and now when the here and now is the soul-deadening sensory-less experience of sitting motionless staring at a flat rectangle of pixels.
Go out in the woods. Get your hands dirty. Meet friends at a bar and laugh until your stomach hurts.
It's so much easier to be present in the moment when the moment is actually high fidelity and nourishing.
Outside, right now, people stay on screens all the time. It's the same stuff. Why even bother?
Humans plan ahead. We look towards the future and the past. Not all the time, but a lot of the time.
This carpe diem stuff doesn't seem like the right way to approach the problem given our current technological society.
Also, I'm not gonna party just because someone told me to.
Suffice to say parent is correct, and you are not.
I was surprised how different it felt to consciously see and touch things. It's not like I'm walking around my house with my eyes closed normally, but most of the time things aren't really registering. Stopping to intentionally focus for a second on an actual object or a sound I'm currently hearing seems to sort of wake me up, bring me out of a trance a little. Not as well as digging in the garden, but not bad for a few seconds in the middle of the work day.
Don't do highly dopaminergic activities like using electronic devices that provide entertainment or communications
My preferred steady state suffering machine is the Concept2 rower. I can keep an eye on stroke/min and cal/hr to stay within a very narrow band of exertion. HIIT and weightlifting are great too, but these are not as strenuous on the brain's "focus for time" circuitry. Lots of downtime and opportunities to get on the cellular device. A straight hour on the rower with the cruise control locked @ 850cal/hr is a totally different kind of animal.
But just because they are the best doesn’t mean their help actually helps.
If you want to get rid of an addiction, stay away from addicts and everything they produce. Stay away from their artistic creations, stay away from their complicated explanations of the world, and stay away from their gossip. Also, please don't study to become any kind of "drug counselor," get regular person jobs and normal hobbies. You're dying of romance, and you need to figure out how to love the world as it is.
I guess you can think of this as my retirement from Hacker News. Thank you kind stranger.
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.)
Make an electroshock gizmo that hits you when your browser visits certain domains?
Advice: love stress. Enjoy it. Feel it. Just don’t ask for it.
Also always go for a walk, touch grass, hug a tree. Pleasant physical experiences are truly effective at getting you into the “here and now”.
No, dopamine is a signaling molecule that participates directly in this functionality.
You're right that it's just a neurotransmitter, but the relative pathways about how they're produced are irrelevant for this study. They looked at how dopamine binds to certain receptors in certain parts of the brain under certain conditions.
I've read "The Molecule of More" and as much reasonably looking material I could find on the subject to "understand" my ADHD and fight it w/o meds. And I still feel dumb. Could you please explain how dopamine "participates directly in this functionality"?
There are receptors specifically for dopamine on the amygdala neurons. Dopamine molecules are released by the pre-synaptic neurons, travel across the synapse, and bind to these receptors.
Dopamine’s role in the nervous system is not simply an intermediate on the pathway to produce epinephrine or norepinephrine. If you thought like this you’d reach the conclusion that testosterone is simply a precursor to estrogen because the pathway to convert it exists in some tissues of the body.
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.
(Of course, like everything in biology, dopamine also does about a gazillion other things, too, so it’s not quite that cut and dry, but it rhymes, at least.)
This is not true in the professional world. People engage in drug use for many reasons, including pure recreation.
Trauma can precede relapses or bouts of drug abuse, but it's not a universal explanation.
There are a lot of pop-culture ideas that explain everything away as trauma. These are popular on podcasts, Reddit, and other social media websites. There are also types of therapists who learned to treat trauma and then try to apply that to everything. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". These therapists will try to reframe everything as trauma because it's what they know how to teach.
They often reverse engineer a traumatic backstory as an explanation even when one doesn't exist. You can find podcasters and therapists who will even claim that being born imparts permanent trauma that explains things long into adulthood. There's no evidence behind this claim, but it's convenient for therapists who need to find a traumatic backstory before they can address something because everyone was born at some point.
> The idea of dopamine as your brain’s signal that you’re safe fits about as neatly with that as can be.
That idea is completely wrong, though.
The study is talking about dopamine signaling in one specific location of the brain.
Dopamine is used in other locations in the brain to encode aversive stimuli, among other things.
Dopamine (and other neurotransmitters) don't just do one single thing in the brain. They have diverse effects all over.
Also, many of the drugs that people associated with dopamine actually have much broader effects, such as on norepinephrine (stimulants) and serotonin (cocaine).
There are dopamine agonist drugs that go in and very precisely target different dopamine receptors in the brain, activating them directly. Many people are surprised to learn that a common side effect of these drugs is an irresistible urge to sleep when first taking them, for example.
>This is not true in the professional world. People engage in drug use for many reasons, including pure recreation.
Drug use != drug abuse
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.
Almost all of my classmates (not me, unfortunately) were from exceptionally wealthy families and excepting one none of them ever mentioned any childhood trauma. Instead they were precocious partiers who got into drugs despite being underage and going to the nightclubs in the seedy part of town - no one at the time was turning away hot young women or gay(for pay or real) young men. And the club scene was a drug scene. It still is.
I don’t think trauma is actually at the root of almost all drug abusers. The only first class abusers (pot and alcohol in serious quantities daily) that I know at the moment grew up in perfectly fine suburban families and are in good, non-narcissistic/controlling/etc relationships with their families. They’re just addicts who can’t stop. One of them is going to die from it, eventually, given his level of alcohol consumption.
I am distracted from work by anxiety. With medication, I'm not distracted.
I mean, there is a reason why it's a controlled substance and is heavily abused all across the world. It works and it works well.
Though, I've been on it for about a decade now, and I have lost a large majority of the benefits it once provided.
I've been a heavy coffee drinker since i was a teenager.
I'm sitting at 13 double espressos today which is about average.
Lately the instant sleepiness post coffee isn't worth the focus, and I'm starting the think medication would be a healthier choice
Just mentioning because curiously it almost entirely put me off caffeine. I still enjoy my morning coffee as a ritual, but sometimes don't finish it. If I have another then the side effects are severe, Ritalin massively boosts those - nerves, jitters, hitting the toilet. Not terrible or dangerous, but just interesting, and honestly caffeine never did a whole lot for me mentally so it's no big loss.
The problem with amphetamine is you pay for every benefit: focus now, lethargy later; energy now, anhedonia later.
But taking a small, consistent dose. Does that work? Do you feel you net benefits in life from taking the drug, discounting for withdrawal and/or tolerance?
Theres a host of physical symptoms that come with it to that are not fun to manage: decreased appetite, dehydration, headaches, sleep loss, heart palpatstions.
I would say its far better to take it on a needed basis once in a while
IMO, that's always just been me. Now vs Later is hard to judge, though, because I tend to have "good focus" blocks of time, and "chill blocks". Exact timing depends on my overall weekly schedule leading up to a time period.
Also, I mentally classify different types of energy. Physical, social, and mental energies all have their different places in a day.
> small, consistent dose
For me, yeah, but YMMV based on brain chemistry and environmental variables. Since I use El Cheapo, I max out at 10mg 2x/day, but rarely adhere to that unless I'm planning ahead for it/have been on that roll for a while. This helps a lot with tolerance, especially when I have lazy weekends.
And from a personal perspective: It's a very simple drug to understand, which makes me feel at ease. Brain goes vroom, like an engine hitting a more comfortable RPM. Not every situation needs my full power.
In my personal testing the Ritalin was much better, dexamphetamine was more up/down and shorter lived. However I didn't really get a crash or lethargy with either, it's just the focus wearing thin (and yes, the benefits were real and massive starting for the first time in my forties).
According to my psych, both have been around 70+ years and are fairly well understood. Longer term therapeutic doses shouldn't be habit forming and tolerance is minor after the initial phase, there's no withdrawal effects and it's easy to forget to take a dose if your routine changes. My morning coffee is far more demanding in that regard.
> But taking a small, consistent dose. Does that work? Do you feel you net benefits in life from taking the drug, discounting for withdrawal and/or tolerance?
There's a reason these medications are supposed to be taken regularly at the same dose in clinical practice. Patients should not be going through cycles of taking stimulants and then withdrawing all of the time.
There's a disconnect between the way some people try to use stimulants ad-hoc versus the therapeutic modality. The initial burst of confidence, energy, and positive mood that comes from intermittent use is a side effect, but people confuse it with a primary effect. They can get into cycles of chasing it with dose escalations or taking it on random days while they exist below baseline on others. This isn't a winnable battle over time because the brain will adapt, not to mention all of those off-days start to add up and people around them notice the extremely inconsistent mood and performance.
Unfortunately, misinformation about ADHD is all over the internet. I recommend ignoring basically anything that comes out of Reddit, Twitter, or TikTok because it's really that bad. Take medications as directed and set yourself up for some stability. Resist the urge to play with doses, take excess doses on some days, or try to play tolerance games. These never work in the long term.
There's a simple heuristic: When you reach stability, you shouldn't really feel the medication. It should be background noise. There's a reason why young people who have been properly titrated on stimulant medications don't understand what the big deal is with their peers taking large doses (without tolerance) and then speeding around for a while. It's where the myth about ADHD people reacting differently to stimulants comes from. Proper treatment will settle to equilibrium and shouldn't produce overt feelings of being drugged or hyperfocused.
With XR, I feel less hyperfocus and more sleepytime disruptions. It's less strong so I take more, but it lasts longer so I get its effects when I don't need it.
I feel like IR is actually less amenable to abuse.
> But taking a small, consistent dose. Does that work?
Typically, no; however, it's context dependent.
> Do you feel you net benefits in life from taking the drug
There are diminishing returns overtime, but there is still some benefit to be had.
> withdrawal and/or tolerance?
Both are real and awful to deal with.
Is it all worth it? I tend to flip-flop back and forth a lot on this.
On the other end there were people close by that having seen war, took a life lesson from their fear response: you survive by being alert and by distrusting. They radiated a permanent state of alarm, as the enemy may come when you least expect it.
Surprised that there is no mention to extreme sports in this.
Big "what a rush" moment right after the person does something extreme and survives. Big dose of adrenaline in there not just dopamine but the parallels seem striking
please? all that lingo is above my pay-grade
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.
> The researchers were surprised that when they activated VTA dopaminergic inputs into the aBLA they could reinstate fear even without any new foot shocks, impairing fear extinction.
That... seems like the first step in being able to literally induce fear without having to bother with pesky things like finding the subject's triggers. Although I suppose if one has direct access to the subject's amygdala, the point is somewhat moot.
Still, it's sort of like a reverse wirehead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
Those organizations do it because they want to, not because it works.