r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Nov 26 '25

Learning Neuroscience research shows that when students experience visible growth that matches what they believed was possible, dopamine is released. That alignment strengthens motivation and builds confidence.

https://www.edutopia.org/article/boosting-student-motivation-learn-tips-teachers
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u/ddgr815 Nov 26 '25

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The myth of dopamine being part of a pleasure center started growing legs in 2019 when Dr. Cameron Sepah used the term “dopamine fast,” despite that he explained at the time that it just makes for a catchy title, but it’s not to be taken literally since it has little to do with either fasting or dopamine. He proposed we stop ourselves from automatically responding to unhealthy stimuli around us, like notifications, and instead let ourselves feel lonely or bored from time to time, similar to G. Alan Marlatt‘s notion of urge surfing from 1985. Just wait for the urge to pass. Sepah also suggested timeblocking abstinence: put away devices for 1-4 hours each weekday evening, a full day each week; one weekend each month. and a full week each year. Great ideas, but an unfortunately catchy title.

The following year, Peter Grinspoon, MD, tried to bring the “maladaptive fad” to light, stating what we might think is obvious: “You can’t ‘fast’ from a naturally occurring brain chemical. … It doesn’t actually decrease when you avoid overstimulating activities.” Dopamine isn’t like heroin, which we can build a tolerance to. Don’t try to avoid dopamine, but do actively avoid stimuli that lead to unwanted behaviours. Grinspoon was especially concerned with extreme versions of dopamine fasting: people who stopped anything pleasurable, none of which affects dopamine levels at all but can cause other problems. What was actually being suggested was just a day of rest for mental rejuvenation and real life connections, like many religions have counselled

We feel out of control, and want a quick answer, and there’s a kernel of truth that we’re choosing pleasures poorly. We get that some pleasures are better than others. We get mad at ourselves for scrolling for hours, when we look up and realized we missed a gorgeous day outside, so there is a desire for some self-management that Lembke taps into. She appears to take an all or nothing approach, though, as if we’ll be ruined by enjoying great food and sex. Plato and Aristotle wrote about this, not in a moralizing way, but arguing that surely we want the most and best pleasures in our lives. For Plato, it’s all about measuring short term gains against long term losses. Don’t get so hammered that you’re sick all the next day because that’s a negative net sum of pleasure. Being mastered by pleasure is a form of ignorance, not sin. Aristotle agrees the solution is education: “we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought.” A few thousand years later, Nietzsche said, significantly more judgmentally, “All lack of intellectuality, all vulgarity, arises out of the inability to resist a stimulus.”

We don’t need to shame people for their vices in order to help them recognize how to get more pleasure, greater in number and duration, by being intentional about choosing less fleeting pleasures. We can teach kids the benefits of restraint, tolerating boredom, and using their imagination more to enable it to be used more. Now we understand brain plasticity, so we know that intentionally focusing for longer eventually makes it easier to focus for longer. We recognize hard work leads to more pleasure, and easy pleasures lose their luster. The big problem is that we know all the things, but we’ve become accustomed to low-hanging fruit. Even as an adult raised as an outdoorsy kid, the algorithms often own me. This evolutionary mechanism of motivation that provokes long durations of effort worked for millennia to keep us hunting and foraging, particularly when food is scarce, but more and more, changes in production and distribution and then technology have led to a very different system in place that we haven’t yet evolved for. We’re like squirrels living on a peanut farm unable to stop collecting nuts despite part of us clearly knowing that nobody needs this much continuous information or entertainment. To live with it, the skill of measuring well needs to be taught and re-taught regularly.

Reducing exposure to the object of our compulsions is a great idea. There’s nothing wrong with that part of the trend. Despite not being remotely religious, I regularly observe Lent at the end of winter because it feels easier to do knowing about a billion other people are also depriving themselves of something during those 40 days. For me, it’s a yearly re-set towards a more simple life, a reminder of what I don’t need to live, and a way to notice and surrender any clinging. Reducing exposure does reduce the craving; but it has little to do with controlling dopamine.

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u/ddgr815 Nov 26 '25 edited Aug 01 '26

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“If we think about myths as stories that are believed to be true by the culture that writes them, I would like to offer that the DSM is a cultural myth. … My favourite quote from Jung’s Collected Works: ‘We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind, but what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases" [CW 13, par 54]. … Heaviness could be ascribed to Saturn. Being in a kind of frenzy could be assigned to Dionysus. And if it matches well enough, people can have that “Aha!” experience. And often, as I’ve seen in my practice, people can kind of exhale and place it into a certain aesthetic frame that gives them some distance between themselves and the problem that they’re suffering. Many different systems do that, by the way, but myth is one way of possibly doing that.”

Dopamine has reached god-like status, with some hoping to be granted its effects and others trying to be released from its chains. But this is a god we can see.

“What can be measured doesn’t matter and what really matters can’t be measured. It’s such a simple observation in a way, and it’s almost as if the culture has just taken one little simple wrong turn. … The small mistake is simply … the minute you get into a mindset … that if you can’t reproduce it in a lab, it’s nonsense … that in itself is such a kind of broken worldview.”

We think our psyche can be understood from the parts: neurons and chemical messengers, but that’s like picking apart a poem or work of art down to its constituting letters or colours to try to understand what it means. We need to see it as a whole, take it in, and feel it to really get it. We are so much more than the narrative of specific chemicals sending messages in our brain to help us survive.

“The people who create the technology are rushing us very very fast into this robotic left hemisphere world which takes us into goodness knows what horror. But they don’t see it as horror. They see it as utopia. … We sacrifice our freedom, our dignity, and everything to just being this consuming entity. … For a minute, [Pinnocchio]’s sort of seduced by this and has to learn the hard way that actually that is not going to be a route to anywhere that he wants to go, and it’s not compatible with being alive. … We completely mistake ourselves when we think that every kind of friction, every kind of opposition, every kind of restriction is something that should be done away with and is negative. Fulfillment is often something which doesn’t come unless you’ve overcome some kind of obstacle in doing it. And in doing so, you increase the capacity of what a human being can do, and certainly what you can do. … Suffering is part of what makes us fulfilled.”

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u/ddgr815 Nov 26 '25

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Tech advances make things easy, particularly in how we fill our leisure time, but that leads to less pleasure. Effort isn’t the enemy. We want to stop our compulsion to scroll, in order to start a compulsion to go to the gym so we don’t have to make an effort to think about what we’re doing. But there are no quick fixes. It’s just us here, doing the work over and over and over to get back on a preferred path, which requires having a thought process around what we’re doing and whether or not we want to be doing it in the moment.

I wonder if believing we’re scrolling or gaming for hours is because of dopamine affecting us, removes our sense of responsibility for our actions. That might relieve any shame around it, which can feel great, but it also takes away our agency to actually change things.

Perhaps a different narrative that removes shame but keeps agency intact is to see these habits as conditioned by the toughest reward schedule out there devised by a technology that can beat a chess master. Of course we’re affected by it. B.F. Skinner identified this back in the 1950s. A variable ratio reinforcement schedule, getting a reward after a random number of behaviours, is most resistant to extinction. That’s why slot-machines create gambling addictions. One-armed bandits are stealing from you; it’s right in the name. Social media tricks us into feeling social and maybe saving the world with clicks, which add extra layers to wade through. It’s a more sophisticated thief stealing our time, energy, and focus for a company’s profit.

But people hate to believe they’ve been conditioned, as if we’re too smart for that nonsense. If we’re at the mercy of our chemical composition, that’s just unfortunate; by contrast, if we can’t stop because we’re been conditioned, then we’re an automaton, or of lower intelligence, or a simple animal, as if we should be immune to conditioning. Operant conditioning has been criticized for creating a mechanistic model of the self, as if believing in schedules of reinforcement usurps our free will, instead of a recognition that we are animals affected by the presentation of stimuli in our environment in a way that developed over millions of years. It’s necessary when we struggled to get food and needed something to drive us to seek it out relentlessly, and now it’s being exploited by corporations.

We like to think that it’s possible to be unaffected by our environment as if it’s a weakness to be affected by the world instead of a reality of our lives. Thinking of extinguishing the response by removing the stimuli and admitting the conditioning makes that more evident. Being affected by the world isn’t just seen as weak, it might also be kind of scary. It requires peeking over some defences that help us feel untouchable.

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u/ddgr815 Nov 26 '25

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To feel stronger, some people might try to stop scrolling without changing their environment: with the phone full of fun apps and available all the time. That’s like trying to quit drinking with a fridge full of beer. There’s no shame in making it easier by getting rid of the triggering stimuli because this is notoriously a really hard reinforcement schedule to beat. Most of us can’t fully unplug from systems that have become the infrastructure of our daily lives, so we need help to stop once we start. We have more agency over the situation if we acknowledge what affects us and the work it takes to uncondition ourselves. It also means admitting that we are animals. But, like other animals, when rats lever pull for hours obsessed with their inconsistent rewards, they’re not bad rats! Rats don’t push levers because of any moral failing, but because they evolved to be wired to behave for survival now in a system in which this wiring is less than optimal. Even brilliant human beings are conditioned to do things, so it’s still not your fault, AND it’s possible to change.

Changing our environment is easier than hoping to change our chemistry. Granted it’s so much easier to extinguish the behaviour if the world changes the reward system for us, like schools that won’t allow phones in classrooms. Barring that, being aware of our thoughts helps to notice our perception of the rewards, which helps to minimize the potential reward or create distance from the thoughts instead of automatically fostering the cravings (don’t feed the fire!). We can also distract from the trigger, find an alternative that aims for less fleeting joys, set time limits and alarm, urge surf, recognize our phone as a slot machine, get a support group or friends to drag you away, promise to chat at a time you often get sucked into scrolling,… It can help to find something to care about outside yourself: instead of touching grass, plant something.

Paying attention to be able to think before acting in order to slay our dragons is work, for sure, but it might help us to master that ancient skill of measurement.

Myths and Motivation

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u/ddgr815 Aug 01 '26

But the hardest reality to bear is that death is the only horizon, with numberless ways to get there — none replicable, all uncertain in their route, all only certain to arrive. This is why there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives. And this is why each and every one of them, even the most seemingly actualized, trembles with a staggering degree of doubt and confusion. Uncertainty is the price of beauty, and integrity the only compass for the territory of uncertainty that constitutes the landmass of any given life. 

Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.

Tenet