When you do something pleasurable, your brain releases dopamine.
This dopamine is like a natural drug. It’s created in your brain’s reward center and released when you are expecting a reward, like a nice big fat chocolate milkshake.
If you get less than normal pleasure from drinking that milkshake does it mean you will drink more to increase your pleasure, thereby making you obese?
Dopamine does a lot.
Actually dopamine has a number of functions in the brain. It plays a role in your behavior, cognition, motor activity, motivation, sleep, your mood, attention and learning.
One function, according to neurologists, is that it’s kind of a teaching chemical. When an unexpected reward is presented, the dopamine neurons in your brain are firing. When those rewards are omitted, these neurons are depressed.
Of course it’s our nature to repeat behaviors that led to rewarding outcomes. Which sets off the dopamine. Which teaches us that the behavior is something we want to repeat.
Thus leading to the milkshake question.
The amount of pleasure you get from that milkshake depends on the amount of dopamine your brain releases.
Dr. Eric Stice, a senior scientist at the Oregon Research Institute in Eugene, led the study which was published in the Oct. 17, 2008 issue of Science.
Brain scans from the study showed that obese people had less activity in the dorsal striatum, the part of the brain that releases dopamine in response to eating, when they drank a chocolate milkshake, compared to leaner people.
People that released less dopamine and had a variant of a gene called TaqlA1, which is related to dopamine signaling in the dorsal striatum, were at risk of unhealthy weight gain, according to the researchers.
The cocaine of food.
“(Dopamine) is the cocaine of food. It’s really good at firing up reward circuitry,” Stice commented.
“The evidence of blunted response leading to future weight gain clearly seems to suggest that people are over-eating in response to this diminished reward that they experience when they eat,” according to Stice.
“It’s much the same way that people who smoke regulate cigarettes. If you give them the low-tar cigarettes, they make up for the lost tar by smoking more efficiently, and get more of it,” Stice said.
For overweight people, sipping a chocolate shake just makes them want more because it fails to jolt the brain’s reward centers sufficiently.
The study involved 43 female college students ages 18-22 and 33 adolescent girls ages 14-18. The researchers tracked their weight for a year after performing the brain scans.
Here’s a way to jolt the pleasure centers, without any calories. Play some mentally stimulating games on your computer. You can check out our games at our web site – Braingamessoftware.com
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