Dopamine - Monday Morning Memo

Dopamine is a type of neurotransmitter. Your body makes it, and your nervous system uses it to send messages between nerve cells. That’s why it’s sometimes called a chemical messenger.

Dopamine plays a role in how we feel pleasure. It’s a big part of our unique human ability to think and plan. It helps us strive, focus, and find things interesting. It’s hard to pinpoint a single cause of most mental health disorders and challenges. But they’re often linked to too much or too little dopamine in different parts of the brain.

“I was bribed into loving John Donne. My parents pinned poetry on the bathroom wall next to the sink where my siblings and I brushed our teeth and paid us for each poem we memorized. I was a mercenary child, with expensive taste in small plastic dog figurines; the exchange rate was roughly four poems per dog, and so I learned a great deal of Donne. I learned, not realizing it at the time, some of the finest love poetry ever written in the English language.

I did not wholly understand the poems, but I understood that I loved them, for the way their vividness took root. And I know now that the poetry you learn as a child comes back to you as an adult. Two and a half decades later, I’m a fellow of All Souls College in Oxford, and I think that much of what attracted me to Donne was his insistence on our strangeness.”

- Katherine Rundell, Sept 10, 2022

Dopamine is a type of neurotransmitter. Your body makes it, and your nervous system uses it to send messages between nerve cells. That’s why it’s sometimes called a chemical messenger.

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