Dopamine is a neurotransmitter – a chemical that your brain uses to reward and control your functions. Typically it is related to motivation, anticipation, and reward seeking.

NT Experience

For NT people there are many triggers that might cause dopamine hits:

• food: especially high calorie or sugary foods
• social interaction: positive feedback, bonding, and increasing social status
• physical activity: the “runner’s high” is a sustained dopamine release
• completion: solving a complex problem or learning a new skill
• discovery: exploration and finding new items
• digital notifications: pings and alerts from your devices
• gambling: unpredictability and risk

Dopamine acts as both a “drive” and a “reward”.

• motivation and drive: the desire to accomplish something and the reward in completion
• learning: it helps the brain remember actions that led to positive outcome
• executive function: focus, working memory and decision making

Dopamine is experienced as:

• engagement
• possibility
• urgency
• desire
• flow
• jitter or buzz

It isn’t an emotion or feeling, it is a chemical that your brain uses as fuel for making you get things done – not calories but drive.

My Experience

Dopamine is NT people is heavily regulated by Social Salience. I don’t have these feedback loops so my dopamine triggers are internally generated and centered around task completion and logical closure.

Generally I feel rewarded by making things that are useful. It doesn’t have to be pretty, but it should do the job it was meant to do. Sure, who doesn’t like gold-plated code, but a little tool that makes something easier for somebody is great too. Iterative work with small deliverables is often better as it gives a steadier stream of dopamine motivation and reward. Big projects are fewer and farther between and provide a larger hit.

I think this has a couple of downsides:

• tasks that can’t be completed don’t provide a reward
  • e.g. ongoing tasks or thinks with vague completion
  • workaround: break it up into smaller tasks (milestones) that can be completed
• I don’t get dopamine from hanging out with people or networking
  • these feel useless to me, but are very important to NT people
  • luckily my lack of social salience means I don’t care
  • however, I don’t typically understand the impact

The mechanism is the same but my triggers are very restricted compared to NT people. This, combined with the lack of care for social signals, probably explains my indifference to social situations. I am not against them, but I do often find them boring unless they involve subjects I am interested in.

My Experience: Big Task Completion

The bigger the task, the harder it is, or the more complex the problem, the bigger the dopamine hit.

I once debugged something over the course of six months or a year – it was impossible to reproduce, but we saw strong evidence there was a problem. I worked on it on and off over this time: whenever I had an idea I might spend a few hours or a day investigating. This continued until I uncovered the missing link: a seldom used API that I hadn’t been considering. Suddenly I had a repro case. I knew where the bug was, I knew roughly what the bug was. It wasn’t my code (organizationally very distant) but I had the key (100% repro case) to unlock everything. We could fix it. I felt a huge dopamine hit – I was shaking. Even though it was late at night I was so excited I texted my boss “I FOUND IT”. Not bragging or looking for praise, but delivery (or a proxy for it). He knew what I was talking about. It wasn’t the end-end of the task, but it was the completion of the hard part – the rest was just cleanup.

My Experience: Animal Videos

I feel dopamine pleasure from watching animal videos. Animals are pure – they have no social signaling (at least that I know of) so we are on even footing.

• kittens and puppies playing
  • Kindchenschema – this is the term for biological recognition of baby features, e.g. large eyes, small limbs, short tails
  • literally “cuteness”
• beavers working
  • seeing animals executing a complex task is pleasant
• capybaras
• animal failures – as long as there is no harm
  • baby pandas falling over
  • clumsy animals of all types
  • incongruity of the situation

I am not happy because the animals are happy, I recognize a cute creature doing its thing and enjoy it. I have no shame.