This book will change your life

This book will seriously change your life if you have an addiction of any kind (which most of us do and don’t even know that a mental health condition comes along with it) it opens your eyes to the world and what’s really going on. Everyone should know how our brains really work so we can be in control of our mental health crisis.

7 people found this helpful

Waste of time!

It started promising but ended in a big disappointment. A lot of talk, sometimes blabbering. I learned more in Habits of a happy brain by Loretta Graziano, even if she talks less about dopamine.

5 people found this helpful

Great life and mind information

A step forward to better realize what I want. Things that I most dream of are in my mind everlasting of that dopamine hit sensation, which is an illusion.

4 people found this helpful

Did not stimulate my dopamine receptors

Lots of facts, theories, examples, poetry……etc

However it was disjointed and just became background noise in my ears.

This could have been great but needs some editing and maybe a different narrator.

3 people found this helpful

A tangible piece of a complex puzzle

This book provides a clearly tangible piece of a complex puzzle, the dopamin molecule and how it can explain many things at personal, cultural and even political scales. These higher level interpretations are of course tricky to verify, but taken as ideas, the book may even be considered as a necessary item in a contemporary anthology of scientific explanations. Also; excellent authors and an excellent narrator!

3 people found this helpful

Very insightful

For a long time I've investigated why my dad was an addict.Why did he choose as he did instead of fighting for recovery. This book sums it up really well. Furthermore, addiction is just one of many chapters in the book. The book provides with a wide range of research-backed analysis of many topics. I fully recommend it.

2 people found this helpful

Amazing!

Loved it! Very good narrator and this book will change the way how you make decisions or at worst, make you to understand why are you doing them. Definitely recommend!

1 person found this helpful

how one hormone drives and effects us

This book explores how a simple neurotransmitter that most people have heard of, dopamine, drives us towards expectation and the joy that we experience through it. There is a different area of the brain that controls wanting something and liking something. With dopamine it becomes a pleasure, something that we may describe as happiness, that drives us towards seeking experiences. They may not necessarily be ones that make us happy, we might get a dopamine rush through the desire of having a doughnut or a nice meal or sleeping with somebody that we desire or taking drugs. However, dopamine will wane and as it does so, we start to lose that feeling that we have and we want to seek something else. Luckily there are other neurotransmitters that might help us to maintain a relationship, but that’s not the role of dopamine. This book hopes to try and make sense of why we are driven to carry out certain actions or behaviours that can have significant consequences, acting like a puppet master pulling strings on a maisonette that we call ourselves.
- There's a fascinating bit of information around nicotine and it really the only reason people might smoke cigarettes is because nicotine is highly addictive but has no high, so a lot of people are just smoking cigarettes to reduce their craving for nicotine which for most smokers on the first time they smoke it do not enjoy it or get high which isn’t the way with other drugs. It does increase your dopamine though.
- Patients with Parkinson's disease, which causes a reduction in the ability to make dopamine, are treated with treatments that enhance the dopamine in the neurotransmitters in the brain. This causes patients who are on this medication to suddenly develop changes in personality including hyper sexuality, gambling addiction, and excessive buying amongst many other behaviours that become much more risk orientated and dramatically change patterns of behaviour in a person. This occurs in one and six patients on this type of medication for Parkinson's disease which can have a significant impact on patients lives.
- Children and young people with ADHD who are often impulsive and have low inhibitions and often speak openly about things that other more reserve people wouldn't and are also prone to increased chances of taking drugs and obesity, their impulsivity seems to stop them regulating themselves and this is often seems to be driven by hormones such as dopamine. - We know a lot about how dopamine works and its effects because of trials that have been done on mice and rats, where dopamine has either been added or reduced and causes quite significant changes in behaviour and personality.
- The author also discusses how emotions impact on the workings of dopamine when contrasted with other neurotransmitters which cause fluctuations in emotion. When we are scared, our amygdala kicks in but when we start thinking rationally, dopamine has taken over.
- Another study looks for how willpower waines over time. An example of this is in a study where people in 2 groups were split and divided into being 1 set offered chocolate cookies that had been baked nearby so the room was full of the aroma of freshly baked food, and others were given radishes. Although those assigned to eat radishes did not eat any chocolate cookies, a further experiment was then carried out afterwards which set a task that was quite impossible to do. Those who had eaten biscuits spent 18 minutes before giving up where those who ate radishes only spent nine minutes on a task. This has implications on people on a diet, willpower alone will not change your behaviour. Dopamine is a finite source.
- The book also looks at the fine line between creativity and madness and both of these are influenced by the hormone molecule that we know is dopamine. When we look at people with madness, often on antipsychotic medicines and what happens is that these people are given medicines which might contain substances which have receptors that allow neurotransmitters and hormones to either increase or reduce in how they work in the brain which can lead to changes in behaviour. And much of this is due to the dopamine molecule
– We make up models of the world to try and understand how the world works and those models are created by the hormones in our body such as dopamine that create how we perceive everything and feel. So sometimes we have to adapt the model of the world that we've created and change it into something else which is something we could do with something like CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) and other approaches.
- The book then goes on to look at politics and how many more liberal leaning people who often are more creative but like change and often have increased rates of marriages are also driven by dopamine which might be one of the reasons why these individuals become more related to their politics and their viewpoint. We do know that people with certain personalities are likely to be more Republican or Democrat (or conservative or liberal) dependent upon how dopamine works in the individual, driven by traits that are already a part of a person’s personality and change.
- There are interesting facts about the difference between people who are very liberal or very conservative. Those who are very liberal tend to be more intelligent than conservatives and they also tend to be more likely to cheat on their spouse in a relationship. They also tend to be more committed to supporting humanity rather than man itself and are much more focused on the bigger picture but conservatives tend to be kinder to friends, more family orientated, dislike change and give larger amounts in regards to charity donations - though this will be more likely to be local causes than worldwide.
- There's also an experiment where pictures of disgust or something that might upset someone were compared to pictures that were positive such as the baby smiling and this in turn showed that conservatives tended to focus more on the negative pictures than liberals who tended to focus more on the positive messages. It's interesting to note that liberals will tend to be more focused on positive change and conservatives tend to be more focused on family values, law and order and things remaining the same.
- Interestingly enough the author describes some experiments that can make someone more liberal and someone more conservative. Just by adding sanitiser to experiments tends to make people become more conservative in their viewpoints where if you ask conservatives to imagine having a superpower, interestingly enough they become more liberal in their viewpoints.
- Another interesting facts about how politics and news is reported is the fact that news has reduced its ability to inform and debate and has turned into entertainments driven by click bait headlines and frequent switches in how stories are told with little analysis and a short time frame to reduce attention fatigue (which appears to have become reduced over recent times) to elicit dopamine hits and switch topics before the effects of dopamine wear off.
- An interesting book on how we are controlled by hormones (I feel I need to know more about them) with a focus on how dopamine particularly drives us.

excelent book

Informative yet interesting and entertaining. The voice was engaging, still calm. I will listen to this book again! Highly recommended.

insightful

really interesting book, putting many things about how we live and enjoy our life into perspective