Heard of Dopamine?

Why do we work, love, and learn?

There are two reasons purposes for living. First, to pursue pleasure and second, to avoid pain. Do we study for the sake of learning an end in itself? Do we marry and raise families because it is a sacrament?

The ultimate goal of human endeavor is to obtain pleasure happiness, joy, and to not experience physical or mental pain. We have kids because it offers us more pleasure than pain, not to please our family, society, or church.

Dr. Emrah Fuzel, University College, London, in a study published in the August, 06, Neuron, has a new twist on the neurotransmitter, Dopamine.

Definition

Dopamine, is a hormone-like substance released into the Nucleus Accumbens, in anticipation of a rewarding experience. It is called the Pleasure site of the brain and regulates our motivation. It controls the flow of information from other areas of the brain.

It rewards behaviors that promote life like appeasing hunger, thirst, and driving sex. Dopamine affects attention, memory, and problem solving our frontal cortex functions. A deficit disorder in learning skills, and schizophrenia are believed to be caused by a reduced amount of Dopamine.

Discovery

Dopamine is also associated with pain and is released on the occurrence of pain. Our brain protect the body from pain by producing the neurotransmitter dopamine. Eliminating pain leads to pleasure a great reward.

It is clear that we have a reward pathway, a neural network in the center of our brain (midbrain): it triggers good-feelings in response to specific behaviors that improves our survival potential.

We Care

The greater our associations between Dopamine and attention, concentration, and memory the more powerful our motivation to learn. Dopamine influences the functions occurring in our frontal and temporal cortices of the brain. Planning, organizing, analyzing and learning are Dopamine driven.

Novelty

Dr. Duzel, UCL, reports that intentionally introducing novelty in your learning, causes a flow of Dopamine into our brain. New facts and ideas while learning improves long term memory performance.

He says: when we see something new, we see it as having potential for rewarding us somehow we explore the environment for rewards.

Secret:

Dopamine responds only to new-images. Metaphors, similes, new ideas and visualizations, cause the Mental-Movie of our brain to change our imagery. When there is a mixture of old information with new-ideas our brain is motivated and triggered by Dopamine to learn and activate long-term memory.

Framing

How we phrase facts and questions create an emotion reaction often leading to different behaviors, decisions and results.

This heart operation has a 40% probability of success.
This heart operation has a 60% probability of failure.

Which statement would motivate you to say yes?

Endwords

Did you know College-Dropouts lose up to $1.5 million in Lifetime Earnings? And up to 50% of entering students quit or are dismissed because they cannot keep up?

Would it help if they could read 3x faster, and remember 2x better?

Executives

The hidden fear of 89% of polled executives is the loss of career because of downsizing, out-sourcing, merger, or bankruptcy.

Would it be a competitive-advantage and place them on the fast-track if they have the learning skill of reading three-books, articles and reports in the time their peers can hardly finish one? Consider speed reading your personal-firewall.

See ya,

copyright 2006
H. Bernard Wechsler