I’m going to skip to what I found most remarkable about this news release from the Waggoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research at The University of Texas at Austin:
“People commonly think of dopamine as a happy transmitter, or a pleasure transmitter, but more accurately it’s a learning transmitter,” says (researcher Histoshi) Morikawa. “It strengthens those synapses that are active when dopamine is released.”
To me, this is a nice description of my strengthening view about the relationship between pleasure and learning.
To backtrack a little, this researcher is saying that alcohol can interfere with conscious remembering, but it actually assists in the development of unconscious learning. Alcoholism is being increasingly seen as a disorder of learning and memory. Another key quote:
“In an important sense, says Morikawa, alcoholics aren’t addicted to the experience of pleasure or relief they get from drinking alcohol. They’re addicted to the constellation of environmental, behavioral and physiological cues that are reinforced when alcohol triggers the release of dopamine in the brain.”