This post is a sequel to last week's article on Serotonin. I'm not going to go over the introduction again; as a result, this post will probably make very little sense to you in isolation, and a read-through of the previous post will be necessary if you want to get anything out of this.

The title is a reference to this song. If you don't like 80's noise punk legends Big Black you're probably gay.

DISCLAIMER 1: This is a fucking huge 2300 word wall of text. Even bigger than the last one. If you are a visual learner, have a low-attention span, or just don't like reading, you will not enjoy this post and should go elsewhere. It's a long, abstract self-improvement post that may help you to improve various aspects of your life to Get More Girls - however, there isn't a single pickup tip in here.

DISCLAIMER 2: This post has been written for laymen, not professional bioscientists.

DISCLAIMER 3: I do not endorse or encourage the use of any illegal substances, and younger TRP users especially should be aware that drug use can frequently be a one-way trip to a wasted life.

So, with the anti-gronk disclaimers out of the way, let's get going!

Summary

I discuss the role of the neurotransmitter Dopamine in your brain, and its role in motivation, self-esteem, and reward. I then move on to give practical tips on managing your own dopamine levels. This isn't a post about how to go out and get laid today - this is a post about psychologically grooming yourself to maintain your frame and state of mind over time.

Intro

Welcome back! My post last week on Serotonin was apparently very well-received, and as I'm now receiving a growing number of PM's requesting a sequel, here it is. I'm not going to repeat the introduction from the previous article – instead, I'm going to assume that you've read the Serotonin post and jump straight into a discussion of Dopamine. If you haven't read the Serotonin post, please see disclaimer #2.

Dopamine

What the fuck is the point of computer games? An utterly worthless hobby that provides almost no long-term benefits and can be dangerously addictive – however, I bet the vast majority of you, just like me, still have some time for the things. What's the point of going out and banging plates 3 nights a week when you could LTR a 4/10 and get your dick wet forever? What's the point of climbing the career ladder? What's the point, indeed, of anything?

Well, the answer to most of the above – no matter what you think your real motivations are – is that you've been addicted to Dopamine since the day you were born, you'll be addicted to the moment you die, and you'll never, ever be free of her. Without Dopamine, you'd amount to absolutely nothing – because almost every single one of your achievements and dreams is, ultimately, about chasing the most unreliable and capricious bitch on earth.

That's right – you've had oneitis for this particular slut every moment of your life, and she ain't even hot. Check her out - http://i.imgur.com/jbM7Lqq.png Solid HB4 at most.

But none of this tells you much at all. Before I can explain what Dopamine is, though, I'm going to need to digress and explain a concept called reinforcement learning. Bear with me.

Reinforcement Learning

Ever heard of Pavlov's dog? It's an old tale – a scientist trains a dog to salivate at the ringing of a bell by associating the sound of the bell with food. He does this by feeding the dog immediately after the sound of the bell over and over again for months, in such a way that the dog eventually begins to salivate and prepare to eat as soon as he hears the bell – even in the absence of food. This is good old fashing classical conditioning, used by everything from schools to prisons to manipulative bitches dealing with their BB. I'll go out on a limb here and say that most of you already understand this concept – after all, we all know how we learn. Let's dive slightly further into the details.

While the exact mechanisms of learning in the brain are extremely complex, here is the ELI5 version. When you carry out a series of actions that results in a 'success', your brain strengthens the synaptic connections between all of the neurons that were activated during the 'successful' action. As a result, this particular pattern of behaviour becomes easier and easier to activate as you repeat the action over and over again. The connections between this 'chain' of cells become stronger, and as each is activated the chance of a related neuron being activated becomes higher and higher. This neural association is the basic mechanism behind all forms of learning, and most artificial neural networks rely on advanced versions of this principle with a few extra factors added in.^[1]

However, here's a massive question - How the fuck does your brain know what qualifies as a success? How do you define 'successful'? How does the fact that an action has been 'successful' propagate back throughout the brain to influence all those patterns of behavior?

Clue is in the title.

Back to Dopamine

Dopamine is your internal, biological high-score system. It's your way of tracking points. This isn't the only thing it does – it's also involved in controlling your focus, motivation, memory, sex drive, and a lot of other minor stuff. Including production of breast milk but I know TRP doesn't recommend lactation game. However, the most important aspect in understanding the effect of dopamine on your everyday life is to understand this role in reward. When your brain registers a 'win' – good food, big lifts, a new plate – it releases dopamine.^[2] This is what produces the pleasurable feeling of 'success' in human beings – it's what makes winning better than losing. It's arguably one of the most fundamentally important chemicals found in our brains as a result – it is quite literally responsible for the concepts of 'good' and 'bad'. While it's difficult to give a full list of what releases DA, exercise of all kinds CERTAINLY does, anything that makes you feel that you've "beaten" an opponent will shower you in dopamine, and anything that results in a definite physical reward - food, girls – will do so.

So, fairly important stuff then. On top of this, differing 'levels of dopamine' in your brain^[3] will control your level of self-esteem fairly directly. The most obvious and extreme example of this comes from taking Cocaine – cocaine is a dopamine reuptake transporter blocker, which means that it prevents Dopamine released from your cells from being deactivated, and so the levels of DA in your brain build up to ridiculously high levels. This is also why coke is in my opinion the most psychologically pathetic drug on Earth – its function is to allow you to pretend you're a better man than you are to yourself for a few hours. Even in the normal-functioning brain, though, Dopamine is essentially responsible for how you feel about yourself – this is in direct contrast to Serotonin, which, as mentioned in the previous article, governs how you feel about the external world. Higher dopamine – the feeling you're doing good in life – will raise your confidence and strengthen your frame. As a result, it's not unfair to say that Serotonin and Dopamine are the only things you'll ever truly care about. Everything else is just an abstract proxy for these two.^[4]

As a result of the fact that Dopamine is released in reward, it's also – fairly obviously – crucial in learning and conditioning. You will want to do anything that releases Dopamine more often, and this is why any useless piece-of-shit activity that releases Dopamine is addictive. Computer Games are the most obvious offender to most of you– the very clear and well demarcated 'wins' along with the constant stream of minor victories makes them horrendously efficient at releasing Dopamine, which is why you were content to play them for 12 hours in your underwear as a teenage boy with no self control. They literally trick your brain into thinking the activity you are doing is more valuable than your real life. However, some of you – including myself – will also have encountered the far darker role of Dopamine release in drug addiction. All physiologically addictive drugs^[5] cause Dopamine release – this is why the aforementioned Cocaine especially is so addictive. Drugs, similarly to computer games, trick your brain into thinking the drug is more important than your real life is – and absolutely no amount of willpower will change this subtle shift, although the desire to continue using can of course be prevented with sheer will. This is also what led to the modern characterisation of addiction as a 'disease', although frankly this is IMO pathetic garbage that justifies the behavior of drug-addicted scum.

Living with Dopamine

In my previous article, I gave tips on trying to manage your own Serotonin – exposing yourself to positive environments with lots of light, etc. Luckily, Dopamine is actually way easier to 'control' in yourself in this. Having read the previous few paragraphs, you should now have a fairly good idea of what Dopamine does. The key to managing your own Dopamine is to understand that any activity that releases Dopamine will make you want to repeat the same action – and that this is a colossal double-edged sword. On one hand, taking coke will make you want to take more coke. On the other hand, deadlifting will – slowly and unnoticeably – make you want to deadlift more until you're addicted to doing deadlifts - hence the genesis of the man now known as GayLubeOil. This is also why physical exercise is perhaps the best way to beat bullshit addictions – drugs, drinking[6 games, smoking. Finally, this is the reason why exercising beats depression – if you're depressed, you either have a very low amount of active Dopamine or Serotonin and that's why you feel either that you personally are shit or that the world around you is shit.

Awareness of this is a huge aid in motivation. The existence of Dopamine is an objective, absolute proof of a statement many of you have heard in the past – "Keep doing it, and it'll get easier."

This applies both to the formation of habits – through addiction to the behaviours as mentioned above – and in learning. Any of you who have found gamified-learning in tiny chunks particularly palatable now understand why – it's designed to increase dopamine release and make the experience of learning both more pleasurable and more addictive.

So, having given all this background? You should be able now to deal with your own Dopamine itself. It's not actually that hard – simply be self-aware that you will want to do anything that releases Dopamine and pay attention to this effect on your psychology. Maximise the Dopamine release of anything you know you should be doing (lift u fuckers) through gamification and tracking stats to maximise your brains perception of 'reward', and minimize or control your use of any unhealthy sources of Dopamine. Understanding this role of DA will help you to beat your addictions, form new healthy habits, and vastly boost your self confidence.

Just to expand on the above - Gamification really is the trick to exploiting your own dopamine. Take a look at how the most addictive computer games structure their constant stream of reward - this is a large part of what makes them fun, and compartmentalizing tasks/giving yourself plenty of tiny 'goals' to maximise the perception of 'wins' allows you to apply the same effect to yourself at will.

Lastly, Dopamine is what makes it easy to brainwash human beings into being compliant slaves. Our entire society is set up to vomit Dopamine all over you for acting like a submissive beta-bitch boy, and manipulative women will take great advantage of classical conditioning to turn you into a gimp. To learn to understand the effect of classical conditioning on yourself is to transcend the countless chains that society places in young men's heads.

Footnotes

[1] - Please note that this is a massive oversimplification for practical purposes – anything more advanced will rapidly descend into computational neuroscience stuff that looks like this - I'm not going there. Fuck you. Buy a textbook.

[2] – Observant readers have just asked "How does your brain decide what actually qualifies as a win in the first place to know when to release Dopamine?" See the textbook above. Again, fuck you, friend. This article will be 5x the length if I try to go into detail on this.

[3] – This is another vast oversimplification but I can't give you guys a college-level neuroscience education in one go, sorry.

[4] Yes I know about Oxytocin and Vasopressin and Adrenaline etc. They're still way less important. Don't be an autist.

[5] This used to be the universal consensus and is now a lot more debated. It may actually be more complex than this, but this is a very accurate and useful 'rule of thumb' for day-to-day life.

[6] Hello Mr Junkie piece of shit. ALCOHOL IS A DRUG TOO, you say? You're technically right, but how many alcohol users have descended into your lifestyle?

Lessons Learned

Dopamine controls reward and learning. Use and abuse it and you'll be able to condition yourself into a better man.

Hopefully this post goes down as well as the last - if it does, I'll be posting further articles of this kind.

If there is a topic within the field of Neuroscience, Pharmacology, or Neuropharmacology you'd like to see covered in my next post, please mention it in a comment!

Debate/Additions

The below includes a list of any TRP posters who have cited scientific sources that disagree with the OP for the sake of intellectual transparency, and any useful additions found in the comments.

TRP poster /u/Keninishna posted a legitimate source to argue that Cocaine is probably an DAT inverse agonist rather than a pure uptake inhibitor. As this paper was published in Dec 2014, it's not yet a commonly accepted consensus but there's a possibility that this is entirely true and that my statement that cocaine is a pure DA uptake inhibitor was incorrect.

TRP poster /u/fingerthemoon added the useful observation that "Dopamine spikes in anticipation of a reward and it spikes way more when the reward is a maybe than when it's a certainty. This is why gambling is so addictive and also why push/pull works as manipulation." He's absolutely correct and I'd forgotten to add this bit. One of the best examples of this is the fact that coke users get significant amounts of dopamine release from looking at pictures of cocaine

TRP posters /u/spibas and /u/Morpheus-Man both reminded me that porn is just as bad if not worse than computer games in excess. Instant gratification that mimics a major 'real' reward is dangerous.

EDIT: You all keep asking me for books, so if you want to go hard and take yourself from 0 knowledge to like... 2 years of college education in the subject, here is the best general Neuroscience textbook, and here is the best general Pharmacology textbook. I learnt significantly more from those two than I did from my nature-published autistic professors.