It seems today that everyone and their brother knows about the dopamine hypothesis of drug addiction. The popular version, simply put, holds that drugs cause pleasure by releasing dopamine into the brain’s reward center, and that addiction occurs when these drugs “hijack” our normal pleasure-seeking activities by releasing huge amounts of dopamine, inevitably turning us into monsters who live only for dope.
The reward center of the brain (the ventral striatum, which includes the nucleus accumbens) was discovered in 1954 by James Olds and Peter Milner. They implanted electrodes into the reward center of rats’ brains, connecting them to levers which the rats could press. Olds and Milner found that rats would spend all their time pressing the lever to stimulate the brain’s reward center to the exclusion of all else, including food and sex.
The dopamine hypothesis of drug addiction was first put forth in 1987, by Roy A. Wise and Michael A. Bozarth, and early versions framed dopamine as the “pleasure chemical” stimulating the “pleasure center” of the brain.
Dopamine is constantly being released into the brain’s reward center, whether one uses drugs or not. But the dopamine hypothesis defined drug addiction as the brain’s association of drug use with pleasure through large releases of dopamine.
The dopamine hypothesis, it should be noted, conveniently reinforces the capitalist-puritan notion that work is good and pleasure bad.
The hypothesis entered the popular consciousness...
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