The "Curiosity Chemical"

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is commonly misunderstood as the "pleasure chemical." In modern slang, we talk of "dopamine hits" to describe what people are doing when they say, spend hours scrolling their social media feeds or spend a day playing video games. Dopamine is involved in those activities, of course, but not the way many people think. It doesn't serve as a reward, but rather as a signal that something is worth pursuing or important. In other words, dopamine is intimately connected with curiosity, not pleasure.When we perceive a gap in our knowledge our brain predicts that there's something here worth learning and dopamine motivates us to act to close that gap by, say, asking questions, experimenting, and exploring. It causes our bodies to join our brain in "wanting." The reward is that we get to update our mental model of the world especially if there is an intrinsic "pay off" and it's this, not the dopamine itself, that reinforces the behaviors that led to it.In…