If you’ve heard about dopamine before, you likely know it as the brain’s feel-good chemical. As scientific terms go, this name is fairly simple – but it’s also misleading. There’s much more to dopamine than stimulus and reward.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

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As Daniel Z Lieberman says “Dopamine is the molecule of possibilities.”⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

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It turns out that dopamine doesn’t really care about stuff you like. It doesn’t really care about anything that is predictable. Instead, dopamine gets released when we encounter things that are new + unexpected + exciting. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

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The bigger & better the surprise, the more dopamine our brain releases – the more pleasure we feel. The high is greatest when we make a “reward prediction error” – in other words when we encounter an outcome that’s better than what we expected. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

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Just think of your first ever Christmas or birthday party. That was dopamine high of unexpected joy! But over time, you probably desired Christmas or the party more than you enjoyed the actual day. And that’s the difference between liking & wanting.