Please stop calling dopamine an addictive rewarding neurochemical (2017)
I don’t really get this article… it seems to make a good argument that dopamine is not the be all end all of addiction.  Yet then it goes on to show that it is indeed a component of addiction, yet one of which is complex and still not well understood.  So in essence, all this article is doing is complaining about pop science and how we often reduce complex behaviours to singular explanations.  But isn’t that just a part of being human?  The article argues that people are more complex and we need to look at addiction in a more complex way.However, nowhere does this article speak about the efficacy of this pop science reduction.  Perhaps it is human nature to try to solve complex issues by reducing the problem to something that can be explained to a lay person, even if such explanations are incorrect.Personally, as someone who struggles with gambling addiction, thinking about dopamine in this “incorrect” pop science way has been incredibly useful as a tool to help me understand irrational decision making, even if such explanations are far more complex.While we do need to guard against pop science reducing complex behaviours to singular causes, I am far more interested in whether it works or not.  From listening to many personal addiction stories and hearing from clinicians, this simplified understanding of dopamine seems to be of major help to many recovering addicts.