Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten

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.

(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.

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.

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!

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.)

The irony of asking on HN how to not use HN

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.)

Well MDMA therapy is a real one and probably much more effective than cocaine for these purposes.

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.

Give it about 5 years.

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).

Also "Duper's Delight."

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.

I believe this may be called neuroscience.

Ask Google Deep Research, I'm sure it will do a good enough job