Dope. - A preview

A teen goes out on a Friday night. He gets caught in an alleyway with three strangers. They are smoking crack cocaine. One of them insists that he tries; another forces it into his hands. He tries. The ventral tegmentum prints out a surge of dopamine.

Every Friday night, the teen goes back to this alleyway and smokes crack with his new friends. Soon, the brain begins to register the action of going out and the environment of the alleyway as a cue to the reward. So the new process gets imprinted. Going out and going to the alleyway becomes a means to get high, a means to the reward.

Over repeated exposure, associative learning occurs, in which the action of going out and visiting that alleyway itself stimulates its own dopamine response, often mediated by VTA projections to the amygdala, which encode cue-reward associations. The associated dopamine response of the cue is found to be separate and surprisingly greater than the subsequent reward of the reward itself.

This means that once habitual in context, dopamine actually spikes during the anticipation of the reward rather than during the actual enjoyment of it. The pursuit of happiness becomes the pursuit of the pursuit of happiness. In other words, the happiness that he are chasing becomes the pursuit itself. Obviously, the reward is still fundamentally important. The anticipation is, at the end of the day, of the reward, so if there is no said reward, then anticipation becomes meaningless. 

Furthermore, Uncertainty also plays a vital role in dopaminergic levels. Say that the teen continues going to that alleyway every Friday night, but now, the chance of his dealers being there falls to 50 percent. In a certain reward environment, the cue fires the initial surge, with dopamine levels then returning to tonic firings until the reward. When uncertainty is introduced to the reward, dopamine levels remain high even after the cue, all the way up until the reward.

In fact, in the fifty-fifty scenario, the dopamine levels in the anticipatory period between the cue and the reward exceed those of the cue and the reward. There is nothing that is more intriguing to our brains than the dubiety of maybe yes, maybe no.

This is the point where the system locks in. Dopamine is not the chemical of pleasure but of wanting. It does not reward happiness, it rewards pursuit. Over time, the brain learns to value anticipation over experience, the chase over the outcome. When that happens, desire stops serving happiness and begins to replace it.

And just as in the case of the teenager, dopamine can become the showstopper for us as athletes as well. It is a trap that so many of us fall into. Drugs, money, lifestyle, you already know the story. The chase quietly replaces the purpose.

But dopamine is not the enemy. The same mechanism that pulls us into distraction can also be a powerful catalytic force if used correctly. The difference is not the neurochemistry itself, but the behaviors and cues we repeatedly pair with dopamine release, and therefore what we train our brains to pursue.

So what should we train our brains to pursue?