Why does the brain develop a tolerance for dopamine?
In: Biology
You don’t get tolerance from dopamine, if that would be the case our lives would be fucked up. DOpamine is involved in motricity, vision and motivated behavior and is secreted all the time with highs/lows depending on what you do.
The closest thing you get from dopamine tolerance is when heavily using cocaine you can affect the balance between dopamine receptors D1 and D2, but that’s because cocaine block our dopamine recapture system causing a massive surge of dopamine (300% of the baseline release if my memory is correct).
D2, which kind of acts like a brake on dopamine neurons, becomes downregulated in some brain regions and that participates in making you crave more and more drugs because the reward system never cools down and gets stuck on a loop of wanting more
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