Happiness & Public Policy

Good, but somewhat dated backgrounder in Psychology Today on dopamine:

Dopamine now seems everywhere in the brain: running through four main brain pathways, picked up by five different types of receptors–each with several subtypes, many still just being defined. Suddenly, the neurotransmitter is the target of research into happiness, attention, extroversion, self-confidence, and goal-direction.

“Dopamine, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” jokes George Koob, Ph.D., a professor of neuropharmacology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Excitement about dopamine is now so high, says Koob, that the danger is not underestimating its reach but exaggerating it: “Today’s gig is that dopamine is a kind of everyman’s neurotransmitter because it does everything. And the fact is, it doesn’t.”

I keep stressing the biochemical complexity of good feelings. Serotonin does one thing, dopamine another, etc., and there may be tradeoffs among each kind of good feeling. Except it’s not like each neurotransmitter is responsible for just one kind of feeling. Each actually does a lot of things, and so knowing the levels of certain neurotransmitters tells us less than we might think in the absence of further knowledge about the activity levels of various kinds of receptors. I guess it would be convenient if there was some single substance, “happy juice,” coursing through our veins that could be measured, but there isn’t. The more we know, the more complex it gets.