A PRIMER ON DOPAMINE

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Dopamine does not generate pleasurable feelings. It's the other way around - pleasurable feelings generate dopamine. The neural circuits that lead us to like things are separate from the circuits that generate wanting. It is easy to confuse 'liking' and 'wanting'. The brain is a prediction machine for rewards, and dopamine represents errors in predicting rewards. When bets by the brain are resolved, dopamine serves as a signal for whether the outcome was better or worse than expected and how much better or worse the outcome was than expected. The higher the surprise, the higher the reward prediction error - resulting in higher activity of dopamine neurons.