The brain releases dopamine as a "reward"; it's a feel-good chemical that contributes to positive reinforcement of various behaviors. People with ADHD have limited dopamine response, which can express as a lack of motivation relative to others.
I was completely sure you were wrong and went and did a bunch of reading on Wikipedia and realized that my understanding of the reward pathway was incorrect. Thanks for educating me a bit today.
I thought dopamine was both the anticipatory neurotransmitters and the reward. But the reward neurotransmitters are different, they're your endorphins, endogenous opioids.
It seems this is a sort of trick our brains evolved to play on us that drives us to act- which makes sense. It is the anticipation of a reward that drives strong feelings and behaviors, but the reward itself is usually not as big of a deal- we work hard for something we expect to be great, but when it actually happens we barely notice and immediately move on to thinking about something else.
If dopamine only happened once you received a reward, it would not cause you to get you to actually act before hand.
Yeah, it is surprising how many of the most dangerous effects of addictive drugs for example happen when you are not immediately experiencing their effects- the actions people take to obtain them. In that sense, I think the idea of downplaying non-drug addictions as categorically less important, e.g. "not chemically addictive" is a mistaken perspective.
I completely agree and you can see it how some people absolutely can't help but destroy their life gambling or thrill seeking or hell, even chasing karma/likes/numbers on social media.
It's still hacking the brain if you make the perfect Skinner box and take all their life savings and then some
All this just means we need an exceptionally strong signal to be able to pay attention. Most things are far too boring to engage us. Even things which were interesting at some point become boring once we figure them out in our minds and all that's left is the execution, the mechanical performance of the work. Hence the tendency to not finish projects.
