Why does the brain develop a tolerance for dopamine?
In: Biology
Imagine you’re a neuron, your job is to send emails (dopamine) to your colleagues (more neurons). You start your shift at Brain Inc. and you receive an email that says something good happened so you start to inform your colleagues through your own emails. You fellow neurons receive the message in their inbox (receptors) and send it on. To make sure that their inboxes don’t get cluttered there is a system in play that removes the emails after some time.
Now imagine that instead of something good happening someone used cocaine. Instead of you sending the email and it getting cleared after sometime, your colleagues keep seeing the email in their inbox. At first the would do their job very well all sending on the email to even more colleagues, but after sometime some of your colleagues would close their inbox performing a worse job. This continues until very few inboxes are left.
At this point you would say that there is a tolerance, because you either need to wait untill all the inboxes open up again but accept a worse performance in the meantime or increase the dose to make sure you completely flood the still open inboxes to keep the performance the same at the risk of closing even more inboxes.
I hope my explanation cleared up some of your questions and if I need to further clarify anything,I’d be happy to.
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