What I've Been Reading

It takes a special person to understand what it means to have a friend who's an octopus. 

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery. A wonderful, mesmerizing and captivating book; I finished the book in one sitting. We need more writers like Montgomery who can enlighten sapiens on the how the diversity on this blue planet is more important than their traditions and gastro-intestinal longings for calamari. I am pessimistic when its comes to human nature and their ability to change their minds but I have my deepest respect for people like Montgomery who try.

So if an octopus is this smart, what other animals out there that could be this smart that we don't think of as being sentient and personalities and memories and all these things?

[---]

It's amazing how little we know about how animals live. The more you know, the weirder things get. It really only in the last twenty years we could even be having this conversation. We're only starting to understand animals. 

What I've Been Reading

Temptation: Finding Self-Control in an Age of Excess by Daniel Akst. Brilliant book with lucid writing which covers from Greeks to Daniel Kahneman; this one book every American has to read.
The core message from Akst: we are not wired to live in the world of excess, so we need to may be seek help of others, may be distract ourselves and be a little conscientious to increase self-control because it is the most important trait in the modern world.

There never has been, and cannot be, a good life without self-control.
- Leo Tolstoy

• If we hold ourselves responsible for our behavior—none of which is entirely voluntary—we are more likely to consciously direct our actions rather than succumbing to impulse. The magnificent result might be for more of us, even in some small way, to take charge of our own destiny. Doing this requires a kind of faith, but only in our own power to choose. It requires imagination, so that we can visualize the future that our sacrifices might produce. And it requires cleverness, for creating methods to promote the kind of deeds we prefer. In the absence of these three things we too easily become our own worst enemy.
• The good news in all this is that, in much of the world, the problem of survival has been swapped for the more manageable one of self-control. The bad news is that self-control in modern life is so hard—which is a shame, because it turns out to be so damned important.
• What self-control doesn’t mean, in my book, is mindless self-sacrifice or knee-jerk self-denial. On the contrary, it represents an affirmation of self, for it requires not the negation of instinct but its integration into a more complete form of character—one that takes account of more than just immediate pleasures and pains. The self-control I’m talking about means acting in keeping with your highest level of reflection. And it’s not easy. One of the most important things I learned in the course of this book is that while we can do better, we can’t do it alone. Willpower by itself won’t get the job done without the help of institutions—a sensible legal framework and strong social connections. The desire to master our impulses will have to be matched with the means to commit to our desired courses of action, so that when strength of will falters (as it inevitably must) we don’t find it as easy to succumb. Reason can’t reliably overpower passion by force, and so will have to use its wiles.
• Credit in itself is not evil; on the contrary, it is the lifeblood of civilization, which it underwrites by fueling innovation and prosperity. The term credit comes from the Latin credo, meaning “I believe,” and it implies a faith in tomorrow on the part of borrower and lender alike. But when credit is used to fund consumption rather than investment, we are taking from the future rather than investing in it, and for a while doing so became a near-universal practice.
• The really big change isn’t in the law but in us. I think we’re more willing to put our own happiness first. People who find their marriages unfulfilling want to split up, and there is no longer much social pressure to keep them together. Should there be? Probably. A little social pressure can do a world of good, as it has against smoking, and as with smoking cessation, third parties would benefit. For implicit in the way marriage has changed in the past half century is a shift in priorities that favors adults at the expense of kids.
• Greek ethics in this period boils down to a single phrase: meden agan, or nothing to excess. Someone who adhered to this principle was said to possess sophrosyne, which means something like temperance or self-mastery. A person who wasn’t sophron must have had some moral deficit and lacked a kind of integrity. The classicist Helen North in her wonderful study of the subject, which appeared in the immoderate year of 1966, nicely described the key components of sophrosyne as “the control of appetite by reason and the harmonious agreement within the soul that this control should be exercised.” So having sophrosyne means that you have a grip on your desires and you are glad that you do. It’s not about self-denial; rather, the emphasis here is on finding a place between too little control (always a danger) and too much, which is not so great either.
• Aristotle also understood that living the sort of virtuous life he had in mind—perennially holding the reins of one’s appetites and emotions, indulging them when appropriate and suppressing them when not—imposes an enormous burden for any of us by ourselves. So he emphasized the role of friends—not acquaintances, or contacts, or drinking buddies, but real friends. These serious friendships take time to develop, he recognized, and we are unlikely to have many of them, but they’re invaluable because they foster virtue. Besides, happiness is not something that happens overnight, or as the result of some quick fix. “The good for man,” Aristotle argued, “is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue . . . in a complete lifetime. One swallow does not make a summer; neither does one day.”
• “The self,” the psychologist Mark R. Leary tells us, “did not evolve to exert the amount of control that we require of it in modern life. To begin with, our lives are filled with far more choices and decisions than the lives of the individuals in whom the modern self first appeared. Spending their entire lives in the same clan, wandering the same territory, planning only a day or two ahead, and practicing the same cultural traditions, our prehistoric ancestors would not have confronted the innumerable choices that modern people must make every day.”
• We aren’t powerless, but we’re weak. On the other hand, what we have on our side is this very knowledge, which we can use as a lever against the world’s enormous weight. Of the three great forces working against the exercise of conscious will, only one is subject to our influence: you can to a degree control your environment. Want to kick a habit? Eradicate the cues. Want to save your marriage? Avoid the hot new hire in accounting. And vote for politicians who are (within reason) likely to help us reclaim the public realm from the forces of temptation. This doesn’t mean a return to Prohibition or prudery; it’s just an acknowledgment that in the face of our own conflicting desires, we might prefer some over others, and we desperately need mechanisms for avoiding the unwanted options we might not be able to resist.
• Depression isn’t anger turned inward, and bacteria (not anger) causes ulcers. Venting anger seems only to escalate the emotion. In fact, since facial expressions and body language generally work in both directions, the physical manifestations of an emotion can magnify it, as recent studies have demonstrated. Both Charles Darwin and William James suspected as much all along. “The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it,” Darwin quite rightly observed. “On the other hand, the repression, as far as this is possible, of all outward signs softens our emotions.”
• Too many behaviors, over the years, have been shifted from the voluntary part of the spectrum to the involuntary part, as if we could no more stop shopping than we could stop breathing. But every time we move something into this involuntary category, we chip away at our humanity. 
• William James devoted an entire chapter to habit in his monumental The Principles of Psychology, observing (with his own ardent italics) that “the great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

Darpa’s Plan To Use fMRI To Recruit Military Dogs

Last year, Emory University neuroscientist Greg Berns and his colleagues trained dogs to sit unrestrained inside an MRI machine, shown hand signals associated with a food reward, and then scanned. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers noticed increased brain activity in the dogs’ ventral caudate, a region of the brain associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine.

In their study, published last April in Public Library of Science One, Berns and his colleagues concluded that the activity was due to a “trained association to a food reward; however, it is also possible that some component of social reward contributes to the response.” Anyone who’s ever held out a piece of chicken to a well-behaved pup already knows that dogs like getting fed when they’re good. And dogs are highly social animals, closely adapted to human behavior given a shared evolutionary history. But the Emory University team was the first to observe this specific brain activity using MRIs.

That seems to have perked Darpa’s interest. (The researchers have even kicked around the idea of using machines to automate puppy training.) The agency believes it may be possible to screen “high-value service dogs … based on their neutral activation to specific handler training cues,” Darpa notes in the solicitation. The idea is that dogs who show greater brain activity when given such cues will be “faster and easier to train” than dogs that show less activity. And instead of merely using approximations of something the dog wants, to make the dog do something else, handlers could fine-tune their techniques to more closely match the chemical responses happening inside the dog’s head.

Neuroimaging may also help spot “brain hyper-social dogs.” These very social dogs, once scanned and located, could be selected for use in rehabilitative therapy for soldiers exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries.

- More Here

Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are - Amy Cuddle

"So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, what we find is that when you're in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. When you're in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that's a pretty whopping significant difference. Here's what we find on testosterone. From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease. So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and, you know, feeling sort of shut down. And we've all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves. Also, our bodies change our minds.

The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this. Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes. So this is two minutes. Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors. That's what you want to do. Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation. Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down. Don't leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn't show them who I am. Leave that situation feeling like, oh, I really feel like I got to say who I am and show who I am."

- More Here

Dopamine Distribution Causes Slackers And Go-Getters?

"Whether someone is a "go-getter" or a "slacker" may depend on individual differences in the brain chemical dopamine, according to new research in the May 2 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings suggest that dopamine affects cost-benefit analyses. The study found that people who chose to put in more effort — even in the face of long odds — showed greater dopamine response in the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain important in reward and motivation. In contrast, those who were least likely to expend effort showed increased dopamine response in the insula, a brain region involved in perception, social behavior, and self-awareness. Researchers led by Michael Treadway, a graduate student working with David Zald, PhD, at Vanderbilt University, asked participants to rapidly press a button in order to earn varying amounts of money. Participants got to decide how hard they were willing to work depending on the odds of a payout and the amount of money they could win. Some accepted harder challenges for more money even against long odds, whereas less motivated subjects would forgo an attempt if it cost them too much effort."

- More Here

How Teenage Brains Saved Humanity!!

Teens gravitate toward peers for another, more powerful reason: to invest in the future rather than the past. We enter a world made by our parents. But we will live most of our lives, and prosper (or not) in a world run and remade by our peers. Knowing, understanding, and building relationships with them bears critically on success. Socially savvy rats or monkeys, for instance, generally get the best nesting areas or territories, the most food and water, more allies, and more sex with better and fitter mates. And no species is more intricately and deeply social than humans are.

This supremely human characteristic makes peer relations not a sideshow but the main show. Some brain-scan studies, in fact, suggest that our brains react to peer exclusion much as they respond to threats to physical health or food supply. At a neural level, in other words, we perceive social rejection as a threat to existence. Knowing this might make it easier to abide the hysteria of a 13-year-old deceived by a friend or the gloom of a 15-year-old not invited to a party. These people! we lament. They react to social ups and downs as if their fates depended upon them! They're right. They do.

In scientific terms, teenagers can be a pain in the ass. But they are quite possibly the most fully, crucially adaptive human beings around. Without them, humanity might not have so readily spread across the globe.
In times of doubt, take inspiration in one last distinction of the teen brain—a final key to both its clumsiness and its remarkable adaptability. This is the prolonged plasticity of those late-developing frontal areas as they slowly mature. As noted earlier, these areas are the last to lay down the fatty myelin insulation—the brain's white matter—that speeds transmission. And at first glance this seems like bad news: If we need these areas for the complex task of entering the world, why aren't they running at full speed when the challenges are most daunting?

The answer is that speed comes at the price of flexibility. While a myelin coating greatly accelerates an axon's bandwidth, it also inhibits the growth of new branches from the axon. According to Douglas Fields, an NIH neuroscientist who has spent years studying myelin, "This makes the period when a brain area lays down myelin a sort of crucial period of learning—the wiring is getting upgraded, but once that's done, it's harder to change."

- More Here

Why Is It So Damn Hard to Change?

Dopamine teaches your brain what you want, then drives you to get it, regardless of what's good for you. It does this in two steps. First you experience something that gives you pleasure (say, McDonald's french fries), which causes a dopamine surge. Some of that dopamine travels to the area of your brain where memories are formed and creates a memory connecting those fries with getting a reward. At that point, in sciencespeak, the fries have become "salient." And when you're exposed to something that's salient, you may think, "That's bad for me, I shouldn't,"  but your brain registers, "Dopamine jackpot!"

Which is where step two comes in: On top of creating memories, dopamine controls the areas of the brain responsible for desire, decision-making, and motivation. So once fries become salient, the next time you see or smell them, your brain releases a surge of dopamine that drives you to get more fries. When you succeed, your brain produces more dopamine, which reinforces the memory that made fries salient in the first place, etching it further into your brain. It's a never-ending cycle: The more you do something that's rewarding, the more dopamine makes sure you do it again. This is precisely how habits form. Eventually, if the fries become salient enough, your brain will release dopamine and push you to get fries anytime you see the colors yellow and red, even if you're nowhere near McDonald's.

You want to know why it's hard to change?" Wexler asked when I first walked into his office. "There are a hundred billion neurons in your brain. Each one is connected to thousands of others. Everything you're talking about—behaviors and learning and memory—involves the integrated actions of hundreds of thousands of cells in intricate systems throughout the brain." In adults those systems are essentially hardwired.

When you're a kid, it's a different story: Young brains are constantly forming new connections between neurons, changing the way children process information based on their experiences. That's plasticity, and it's why children soak up language and adapt to new cultures at rates that put adults to shame. "By the time we hit our 20s," Wexler says, "our brains have lost most of their plasticity." But fortunately, they haven't lost all of it.

Imagine you've got one strong eye and one weak eye, he tells me. If you cover the good eye with a patch, so it gets no stimulus, the weak eye will get stronger. But the second you remove the patch, the strong eye kicks in again and the weak one gets weaker. The same is true of all pathways in the brain. Once established, they stick around and remain strong as long as they're being used. So the first step toward change, Wexler says, is putting a "patch" over the pathway you want to lose (like, say, a chocolate obsession), which means eliminating anything that activates it (having chocolate in the house, going places where you usually buy chocolate). This is why, for many people who try to quit drinking or smoking, it's impossible to have just one glass of wine or cigarette. It's why heroin and coke addicts must avoid places and people connected to their drug days.  But disabling the old pathway isn't everything. Searching your brain for an existing healthy pathway—even a tiny weak one—and then strengthening it can make things much easier."


- via FS

Human Animal & Non-Human Animals - Robert Sapolsky

For a Sapolskyl fan, this is fascinating as usual!!

Musical Thrills = Rush of Dopamine

One more addition to that dopamine driven reward circuit - here:
“If music-induced emotional states can lead to dopamine release, as our findings indicate, it may begin to explain why musical experiences are so valued. These results further speak to why music can be effectively used in rituals, marketing or film to manipulate hedonistic states. Our findings provide neurochemical evidence that intense emotional responses to music involve ancient reward circuitry and serve as a starting point for more detailed investigations of the biological substrates that underlie abstract forms of pleasure.”

Dopamine @ Works

"Humans have that second relentless cognitive clock ticking inside their heads, counting down in a covert yet unassailably certain way the hours and minutes of our remaining time on Earth. Just as we literally hunger for food and water to forestall physiological death, we figuratively hunger for wisdom to forestall spiritual and existential death. The path of the well-lived, virtuous life has meaning precisely because that path arrives, for every living soul, by whatever circuitous route, at exactly the same destination."

Stephen Hall, Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience

Bubbles and Irrationality of Pre-frontal Cortex

Another fascinating eye-opener from Jonah Lehrer!!

"Montague’s experiments go like this: A subject is given $100 and some basic information about the stock market. After choosing how much money to invest, the player watches as his investments either rise or fall in value. The game continues for 20 rounds, and the subject gets to keep the money. One interesting twist is that instead of using random simulations of the market, Montague relies on real data from past markets, so people unwittingly “play” the Dow of 1929, the S&P 500 of 1987 and the Nasdaq of 1999. While the subjects are making their investment decisions, Montague measures the activity of neurons in the brain.

At first, Montague’s data confirmed the obvious: our brains crave reward. He watched as a cluster of dopamine neurons acted like greedy information processors, firing rapidly as the subjects tried to maximize their profits during the early phases of the bubble. When share prices kept going up, these brain cells poured dopamine into the caudate nucleus, which increased the subjects’ excitement and led them to pour more money into the market. The bubble was building.

But then Montague discovered something strange. As the market continued to rise, these same neurons significantly reduced their rate of firing. “It’s as if the cells were getting anxious,” Montague says. “They knew something wasn’t right.” And then, just before the bubble burst, these neurons typically stopped firing altogether. In many respects, these dopamine neurons seem to be acting like an internal thermostat, shutting off when the market starts to overheat. Unfortunately, the rest of the brain is too captivated by the profits to care: instead of heeding the warning, the brain obeys the urges of so-called higher regions, like the prefrontal cortex, which are busy coming up with all sorts of reasons that the market will never decline. In other words, our primal emotions are acting rationally, while those rational circuits are contributing to the mass irrationality.

This is a costly mental mistake. Montague notes that investors who listened to the prescient dopamine neurons would earn much more money than the typical subjects, largely because they would get out of the market before it was too late. “It’s crazy to think that there’s a signal in our head that’s so much smarter than we are,” Montague says.

While these data contain plenty of caveats, they nevertheless provide an important insight into how the brain makes sense of the marketplace and why we sometimes get swept away by speculation. The mind is not a single voice but an argument, a chamber of competing voices, and a bubble occurs when we listen to the wrong side."

Love Helps Relive Pain

Excellent research study - here (via 3QD):

The concept for the study was sparked several years ago at a neuroscience conference when Aron, an expert in the study of love, met up with Mackey, an expert in the research of pain, and they began talking.

"Art was talking about love," Mackey said. "I was talking about pain. He was talking about the brain systems involved with love. I was talking about the brain systems involved with pain. We realized there was this tremendous overlapping system. We started wondering, 'Is it possible that the two modulate each other?'"

"When people are in this passionate, all-consuming phase of love, there are significant alterations in their mood that are impacting their experience of pain," said Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, chief of the Division of Pain Management, associate professor of anesthesia and senior author of the study, which will be published online Oct. 13 in PLoS ONE. "We're beginning to tease apart some of these reward systems in the brain and how they influence pain. These are very deep, old systems in our brain that involve dopamine — a primary neurotransmitter that influences mood, reward and motivation."

Scientists aren't quite yet ready to tell patients with chronic pain to throw out the painkillers and replace them with a passionate love affair; rather, the hope is that a better understanding of these neural-rewards pathways that get triggered by love could lead to new methods for producing pain relief.

"It turns out that the areas of the brain activated by intense love are the same areas that drugs use to reduce pain," said Arthur Aron, PhD, a professor of psychology at State University of New York at Stony Brook and one of the study's authors. Aron has been studying love for 30 years. "When thinking about your beloved, there is intense activation in the reward area of the brain — the same area that lights up when you take cocaine, the same area that lights up when you win a lot of money."

The "other" side of Dopamine

"While dopamine neurons are relatively rare, they are clustered in very specific areas in the center of the brain, such as the nucleus accumbens and ventral striatum. These cortical parts make up the dopamine reward pathway, the neural system that’s responsible for generating the pleasurable emotions triggered by pleasurable things.  It doesn’t matter if we’re having sex or eating sugar or snorting amphetamine: These things fill us with bliss because they tickle these cells.

But the caricature of dopamine as simply the chemical of hedonism is woefully incomplete. For instance, studies have shown that the dopamine reward pathway is also extremely active when people are forced to eat something disgusting, or when a subject is gasping for air after holding their breath. These are intensely unpleasant experiences, and yet our dopamine neurons are pumping out neurotransmitter. This leaves two possibilities: 1) We are all secret masochists, and take pleasure in pain or 2) Dopamine is really about attention and motivation, and is not just the chemical of pleasure and rewards."

-more here

Curiosity and Dopamine

"The lesson is that our desire for abstract information – this is the cause of curiosity – begins as a dopaminergic craving, rooted in the same primal pathway that also responds to sex, drugs and rock and roll. This reminds me of something Read Montague,  a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told me a few years ago: “The guy who’s on hunger strike for some political cause is still relying on his midbrain dopamine neurons, just like a monkey getting a sweet treat,” he said. “His brain simply values the cause more than it values dinner…You don’t have to dig very far before it all comes back to your loins.”
-Jonah Lehrer

Why We Fall in Love?

Today is was searching something else on TED video's and Helen Fisher popped up. Her book Why Him? Why Her? is of my favorite and there is lots of truth to it. Please don't use it as a 'bible" but it will definitely answer lot of our "questions". This one is from her previous book - Why We Love? - Love is a drive (Yes, it's Dopamine driven)

"What 'tis to love?" Shakespeare said. I think human beings have been wondering about this question since they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars a million years ago. I started out by trying to figure out what romantic love was, by looking at the last 45 years of research on, just the psychological research, and, as it turns out, there's a very specific group of things that happen when you fall in love.

The first thing that happens is, what I call – a person begins to take on, what I call, ‘special meaning.’ As a truck driver once said to me, he said, "the world had a new center, and that center was Mary Anne." George Bernard Shaw said it a little differently. He said, "love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another," and, indeed, that's what we do. (laughter) And then you just focus on this person, you can list what you don't like about them, but then you sweep that aside and focus on what you do. As Chaucer said, "love is blind.”

I'm trying to understand romantic love. I decided I would read poetry from all over the world and I just want to give you one very short poem from 8th century China, because it's an almost perfect example of a man who is focused totally on a particular woman. It's a little bit like – when you are madly in love with somebody and you walk into a parking lot, their car is different from every other car in the parking lot, their wine glass at dinner is different from every other wine glass at the dinner party and, in this case, a man got hooked on a bamboo sleeping mat. And it goes like this.

It's by a guy called Yuan Chen: “I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat. “The night I brought you home I watched you roll it out. He became hooked on a sleeping mat,” – probably because elevated activity of dopamine in his brain – “just like with you and me.”



Btw, Bollywood answer is cool too!!




"The God of love lives in the state of need. Love is a need, like hunger and thirst."
-Plato

Good theory on Fermi’s Paradox

Fermi’s Paradox is the discrepancy between the high probability of existence of aliens (because of billion stars in the universe) and the obvious lack of any contact with them. This theory is based on the sorry of our society.

"Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good."

That damn Dopamine again!!

Excellent post by Ed Yong on "Travels with dopamine"

"Tali Sharot from University College London found that if volunteers had more dopamine in their brains as they thought about events in their future, they would imagine those events to be more gratifying. It's the first direct evidence that dopamine influences how happy we expect ourselves to be.
hen we learn about new experiences, neurons that secrete dopamine seem to record the difference between the rewards we expect and the ones we actually receive. In encoding the gap between hope and experience, these neurons help us to repeat rewarding actions.
This was clearly demonstrated in 2006, when Mathias Passiglione showed that people's ability to learn about rewards could be improved by giving them a drug called L-DOPA. It's a precursor to dopamine, a sort of parent molecule that can increase the concentrations of its offspring. Passiglione asked volunteers to learn links between different symbols and different financial rewards. He found that under the influence of L-DOPA, they were better at picking the symbols that earned them the most cash.
Passiglione's study was important, but his volunteers were forced to make a fairly artificial choice between two virtual symbols in a constrained lab setting. What happens in real life, when choices are complex and our decisions hinge on our ability to think about the future?
To answer that, Sharot recruited 61 volunteers and asked them to say how happy they'd feel if they visited one of 80 holiday destinations, from Greece to Thailand. All of the recruits were given a vitamin C supplement as a placebo and 40 minutes later, they had to imagine themselves on holiday at half of the possible locations. After this bout of fanciful daydreaming, they had to take another pill but this time, half of them were given L-DOPA instead of the placebo. Again, they had to imagine themselves in various holiday spots.
The next day, Sharot brought the volunteers back. By this time, they would have broken down all the L-DOPA in their system. She asked them to choose which of two destinations they'd like to go to, from the set that they had thought about the day before. Finally, they rated each destination again.
By the end of the experiments, they perceived their imaginary holidays to be more enjoyable if they had previously thought about the locations under the influence of L-DOPA (while vitamin C, as predicted, had no effect). The implication is clear: think about the future with more dopamine in the noggin and you'll imagine that you have a better time.
Critically, this wasn't because they were feeling happier in the actual moment. All the recruits filled in questionnaires about their emotional state every time they took a pill and these revealed that the dopamine boost didn't actually affect the present state of mind. All it did was change their predictions of their future state of mind. These happier predictions affected their choices too - more often than not, they chose to travel to destinations that they had envisioned through dopamine-tinted goggles.
How dopamine has its way is unclear. Sharot suggests that it could boost how much we want something when we imagine it. Its effects could also tie into its role in learning. When we imagine the future, this chemical strengthens the link between what we think about and any feelings of enjoyment we might gain from it. This model fits with the fact that some neurons in the striatum become more active the more pleasure we expect from an experience.
Either way, it's clear that our knowledge of dopamine's myriad roles is just beginning. Broadening that knowledge is important for understanding our own behaviour, which, as Sharot says, "is largely driven by estimations of future pleasure and pain"."

I am slowing getting in terms with the fact that my restlessness of not acquiring knowledge fast enough and the even the quest of knowledge is driven by Dopamine. I was stupid to be "prematurely polarized" (which by itself is ludicrous to love/hate a neurotransmitter) against Dopamine (and pro Oxytocin) oblivious to the fact Dopamine is multifaceted.