Why can’t/doesn’t our brain just produce infinite dopamine constantly?
In: Biology
That trait didn’t evolve because it wouldn’t be a survival advantage. Because then you wouldn’t be motivated to do anything, and therefore wouldn’t (survive to) reproduce.
Any ancestors that happened to have a tons-of-dopamine-all-the-time “adaptation” would have had no motivation to eat or mate or anything else, so they’d have been rapidly out-bred by others who had to eat and mate and accomplish stuff in order to feel good.
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Because then that would be the norm, and it would be exactly the same, and for motivation you’d need something else, or simply more dopamine.
Your brain produces dopamine all the time. If you give it a bit more, you may feel high, but if you keep giving more dopamine, it’ll become your new normal eventually and you’ll need more.
On a side note, try to remember that our brains are evolved to keep us alive, *not happy*.
If you want to survive and reproduce, then your children also want to survive and reproduce.
If you have infinite dopamine, then you don’t have children. Because why would you want to do anything if you have infinite dopamine anyway.
Dopamine helps you focus on pursuing important things (food, safety, sex, really any important stimulus). If you overproduced dopamine, you’d have the opposite problem of people with ADHD: you’d become engrossed in the first thing that catches until you starve to death.
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