Chemistry of the Adaptive Mind: Lesson from dopamine

8 important questions on Chemistry of the Adaptive Mind: Lesson from dopamine

What is the core of interest of Cognitive Control?

Mental processes that obtain our goal by resisting distractions and impulses and temptations

How to manipulate and measure dopamine?
-> Is it by administer a drug that contains dopamine as an ingredient and measure dopamine in the blood?

No, dopamine is too big to past the blood brain barrier.

Instead we administer in the lab to patient who needed the precursor that past the blood brain barrier and then synthesised in dopamine and released from the vesicles in the synapses.

Function of Methaphenidate = Ritalin

  • Dopamine transporter blocker
    • blocks the dopamine transporter and as a result dopamine cannot take up in the presynaptic element and there is a lot of dopamine around
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To account for these contrasting effects for medication, people put forward dopamine overdose hypothesis:

Dopamine doses that might be necessary to remedy the severely dopamine depleted in the dorsal striatum and might actually that overdose relative dopamine levels in the ventral striatum

Dopaminergic drugs in experimental animals

  • Both insufficient as well as excessive DA receptor stimulation impairs performance
  • Rats perform memory tasks.
    • dopamine agonist, placebo and agonist etc.
  • Optimal -> intermediate levels
  • poor -> when the stimulation is too high or low

What is the function of the NoGo pathway?

Inhibit actions associated with punishment

What do we predict?
  1. Punishment learning OFF > ON
  2. Reward learning OFF > ON

Punishment learning OFF > ON, because:

When you get a reward:
  1. Dopamine increases
  2. Potentiate activity in the go pathway to reinforce the action that lead to that reward.
  3. Also inhibit activity in the nogo pathway. It inhibits the tendency to inhibit the action, releases the action
  4. Reward action is released.

Punishment, the dip is happening in dopamine neurons -> reduces activity in go pathway, releases activity in nogo pathway à inhibit the action that lead the punishment

What effect as dopamine according to the Opponent Actor Learning Model?

Dopamine increases sensitivity to benefits over costs by increasing Go versus NoGo pathway activity

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