Dopamine messenger can be willfully controlled

Feeling vibrant and immersed in pleasure after a glorious victory to even the thrill of hearing an ice cream truck, dopamine takes all the credits. Dopamine has been called the brain’s ‘feel good’ chemical related to delight and satisfaction.

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 extraordinary human ability to think and plan.

It has been shown that mice can willfully manipulate random dopamine pulses, according to the study at the University of San Diego published in the journal current biology.

UC San Diego graduate student Conrad Foo led research that found that the neocortex in mice is flooded with unpredictable impulses of dopamine that occur approximately once per minute.

The researchers designed an experiment in which mice on a treadmill received a reward if they showed they were able to control the improvised dopamine signals. Not only were mice aware of these dopamine impulses, the data exposed, but the results confirmed that they learned to anticipate and voluntarily act upon a part of them.

"Critically, mice learned to reliably evoke (dopamine) impulses before receiving a reward," the researchers note in the paper. "These effects reversed when the reward was removed. We posit that spontaneous dopamine impulses may serve as a salient cognitive event in behavioral planning."

Researchers further speculate an animal’s sense of unplanned dopamine impulses may motivate it to search and forage in the absence of known reward-predictive stimuli.

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