Dopamine - its role in memory

Popular literature refers to dopamine as the pleasure molecule. It is the hormone released when you are happy.

But did you know it plays a vital role in memory and cognition?

In fact, the very action of giving pleasure helps you learn and recall. Let us understand how.

Each time you experience something, your brain is using the experience to learn.

Was the experience positive? Beneficial? Did it enhance my survival odds or detract from them?

Each time before your brain experiences, it makes a prediction of the likely outcome. It needs to do this to enable you to respond appropriately.

So, when it senses danger, predicts it to be so and then learns that it was correct, you release dopamine.

The accuracy of the prediction governs saliency. Consider saliency as your score out of a hundred. The closer you get to a perfect score, the more dopamine you get.

So dopamine is not being produced to give you pleasure alone, so sorry to say. It is also driving your experience of pain.

It is produced to teach you the consequences of your prediction, response and survival as a result both positive and negative.

One of the most common myths surrounding dopamine is the benefit of withdrawal. Withdraw from all pleasurable actions and you will undergo a dopamine detox.

In today’s world, withdraw from social media and the constant hits of dopamine you get, for example.

But since dopamine is produced both for pleasure and pain, just in varying quantities, it is not really a detox.

Which is not to say that you might not do well to remove unnecessary distractions. There is such a thing as too much.

The best way to use this neurotransmitter is to train your body to predict more accurately, the likely outcome of something you are doing.

Simple things like saying I will go for a walk and actually going will do.

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