What does dopamine do?

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter,* and pretty doggone fun as neurotransmitters go. It works with serotonin and norepinephrine to regulate various components of your well-being: mood, attention, motivation, desire, pleasure, and as you might imagine from the rest, sexuality. Dopamine itself helps to generate the feeling of pleasure associated with rewarding experiences — food, sex, and drugs can set it to flowing. Consequently, it can kick-start motivation, desire, and other reactions that naturally follow a pleasurable experience.

Dopamine helps you to think, too. In the frontal lobe, it plays a part in memory and problem-solving. Also, you know the good feeling you can get from learning something new? That’s dopamine at work, encouraging you to continue, and thereby helping to thicken the myelin sheath that makes brain signals zip along faster.

Sweet stuff, huh? But get too much of it and you can go schizophrenic or even psychotic. Too little of it, on the other hand, and your basal ganglia can malfunction, leading to Parkinson’s disease. No fun. So if you were thinking of eating a chocolate truffle while snorting coke off the thigh of a Cuban virgin, you might want to reconsider.

* Its chemical formula is C₆H₃(OH)₂-CH₂-CH₂-NH₂. You wanted to know that.