Dopamine and procrastination
OK, I’ve learned a bit about dopamine and how it relates to various addictions and behavior modification. Dopamine is strongly implicated in addiction to alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, heroin, and morphine. It’s also the chemical release when some task has been sucessfully completed, by a person’s own standards. This positive feedback effect is probably why we become addicted to Sudoku or crossword puzzles. I think it can also explain blog commenting—we get a dopamine rush when we get approval from other commenters, and posting on friendly sites with likeminded commenters is likely to get us approval for many of our comments, and so we end up trying to comment a lot to get and maintain that approval.
Also, there’s probably something satisfying, and dopamine-inducing, about discovering a new and interesting piece of information. Both commenting and reading can lead to this.
It’s possible dopamine plays a central role in all kinds of human motivation and reinforcement learning, though to what extent I couldn’t say (and probably isn’t known yet).
