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What is Dopamine
Dopamine is a fairly well known neurochemical, but scientists are still working to understand exactly how it functions in the brain and how varying levels of the chemical affect personality. While it gets most of its reputation from having control over the body and mind’s motivation functions, recent studies have shown that Dopamine’s role in learning is important as well.
Dopamine is known to create a sense of desire to do an action and is released when someone sees something they consider desirable. Dopamine is basically the chemical that makes a person think “Ohhh I want that!”.
See a delicious cupcake and get an urge to bite into it? Dopamine. See an attractive man or woman and want to be closer to them? Dopamine. Get a thrill from receiving a reward in a video game for completing an achievement? Dopamine.
Dopamine begins to build in the brain as soon as it detects something it feels that we should be motivated to desire. After this point it builds and builds as the desired object gets closer and levels peak right as the desire is satiated, i.e. biting into the cupcake, hugging that loved one, hearing the rewarding notification on our phone or computer.
A severe lack of dopamine can lead to a physically debilitating condition called Parkinson’s Disease, where sufferers have difficulty controlling their movements and motivating their muscles to even act. Lower levels of dopamine are also associated with Depression where patients struggle with motivating actions and report feeling lethargic and unmotivated in life.
While dopamine does not act alone in these conditions, it clearly has some sort of role in creating a sense of motivation and without enough dopamine, the brain literally can no longer control physical movements. Some newer studies, however, are focusing more on Dopamine’s role in learning.
Research on Dopamine’s Role in Learning and Motivation
Scientists in a study just released this year looked into how dopamine uses motivation pathways in the brain and how that may be important for starting learning pathways. The researchers compared two different types of learning, Pavlovian conditioning and Operant Conditioning.
Pavlovian conditioning, famous for the dog and bell experiment, is the type of learning where the brain learns to connect a stimulus with a reward such as a dinner bell with food being served. Operant conditioning refers to the type of learning where a subject must undergo some sort of action in order to receive a reward such as pressing a lever to release some food into their enclosure.
Rats were put into both learning conditions and they had their dopamine levels measured in their brains. While both of the learning conditions saw increased levels of dopamine, the rats in the Pavlovian training only saw a short spike of dopamine as they received their reward while the rats that had to do a bit more work to receive their reward saw a much longer sustained increase in dopamine throughout the entire time they worked for their reward.
While this may initially seem to clearly show that dopamine is simply a motivation chemical as the more motivation required, the more dopamine the rats had, but the scientists suggested an alternative understanding. According to the researchers themselves, “sustained dopamine levels may be an intermediate between learning and action, conceptually related to the motivation to generate a reward-achieving action.”
In other words, dopamine may the motivator to begin a learning pathway and once the reward has been achieved and the brain can log that reward into the learning pathway, dopamine is no longer required. This makes sense as very little motivation is needed to simply take a reward that is associated with a signal, but the brain does still need to learn to associate the two stimuli of bell and food or light and food in order to teach the brain to remain aware for the possibility of reward.
This would also make dopamine tolerance make a lot more sense. As the brain gets a certain reward repeatedly, the dopamine that is released becomes less and less effective at creating that thrill from before. Anyone who has eaten a large amount of their favorite dessert will understand dopamine tolerance. While the first chocolate bar is unbelievably delicious, each subsequent chocolate bar is less delicious and satisfying.
After a reward has been experienced, it becomes less exciting each subsequent time until it seems to have completely lost its luster. This suggests that dopamine may have a role in the initial creation of new learning pathways and directing the brain into what should be learned about to achieve the best rewards.
The body and brain are naturally predisposed to seek variety in rewards to ensure that they receive a variety of nutrients and a suitably genetically different mate. The dopamine reward system may help to ensure that the rewards sought are different, exciting, and new and encourage us to try new things and not get stuck into ruts.
This explains humans’ endless curiosity, desire to understand the unknown despite a natural fear of it, and the struggles many feel about consistently sticking to routines. Dopamine’s role in learning is clearly not just in motivation but in directing learning.
Dopamine’s Role in Learning in the Classroom
While every teacher understands that depressed or simply unmotivated students learn less, this research should help to elucidate the neural underpinnings of the behaviors they are seeing. Armed with this knowledge they can make better decisions on how to rekindle that motivation, whether it be with new knowledge of how to excite the dopamine system or understanding that this chemical imbalance may not be able to be solved exclusively in the classroom and will probably require the help of outside experts as well.
With this new understanding of dopamine’s role in learning as the chemical that tells the brain where they should put their learning efforts in order to seek a reward, teachers can see that without the proper motivation, students will not even begin to create learning pathways on the topic the teacher is teaching. Teachers should ensure motivation is targeted first, and only then put effort into the subsequent learning.
If lessons are unmotivating due to seeming outdated, practically useless, or simply being presented in a painfully dull way, even the most mature students will struggle to overpower their brain’s natural functions to learn about the topic. If they do, they will often only learn it at a surface level to complete a test and then quickly move their motivation elsewhere to more rewarding pursuits.
While many teachers suggest that it is not their job to “entertain” or keep students interested, but to give information, this brain research suggests otherwise. Teachers should value motivation much higher as it is the precursor required for any long term learning to take place.
Teachers should spend the early parts of their class explaining the practical purpose of their class, how the course materials will help prepare the students for real life, and last but absolutely not least, focus on getting their students excited and motivated to learn about the topic. This will keep students from simply going through the motions to simply avoid punishment and bad grades, but instead create self motivated students that seek out the learning themselves without having to be threatened or constantly prompted and hand-held through each and every activity.
This new understanding of dopamine’s role in learning as a link between motivation and learning helps to explain why young children seem to be able to learn so much so quickly about their seemingly silly video game or TV worlds, but struggle to learn even basic spelling lists or math operations. Motivation creates a natural desire to learn more in order to seek an intrinsically recognized reward rather than learning the bare minimum to simply avoid the worst of a punishment.
This should show teachers that actually, most of their job should be about inspiration, motivation, and creating passion in students rather than any old fashioned notion about “teaching” them. Teachers are not AI simply spitting out mindless lessons based on prompts from their curriculum coordinators, but people intensely passionate about their subject who should make their main goal getting as many of their students infected with their passion as possible throughout the year.
This is especially important for students who have mental conditions or those that may be struggling with depression. In a depressive state, the brain will be completely unable to focus on higher level learning when their brain is seeking even basic joy in life.
Teachers will need to deal with these students in a variety of ways depending on the severity and length of their depression. Some depressions are short lived and a natural part of human life and can simply be waited out with kindness, encouragement, and patience. Others are the result of serious trauma or other comorbid mental conditions, and will require outside support.
In any case, depressive states in students should be monitored closely and any concerns should be communicated to the school’s learning support department or the school psychologist. It is better to be overly cautious and report too early than to wait too long, so if there is ever any question, air on the side of caution and mention your concerns to another staff member.
Conclusion
Dopamine and motivation clearly have a key link, but new research suggests that dopamine may have a lesser recognized role in directing and creating new learning pathways. Dopamine’s role in learning may be vital in telling the brain what it needs to focus on learning about in order to achieve a goal or reward, but once that learning is complete, dopamine’s effects will quickly fade and motivate the individual to seek new experiences.
School can be a very unmotivating place where students often feel they go to “work” every day rather than going to learn about exciting new topics that will improve their lives. Presenters focus endlessly on remaining engaging for adult speakers to get their messages across, and teachers similarly need to keep motivation and interest in mind despite having a captive audience.
If a teacher can infect students with a self-motivated sense of desire to learn, the learning will happen nearly effortlessly if the students are provided with a nurturing environment with stimulating ideas and topics. Most of a teacher’s mindful effort then, especially at the beginning of the year, should not be about cramming in lectures about as much content as possible, but thinking about what will create the most excitement, engagement, and understanding on the topic in their students.
While teachers do need to of course make sure students have covered content they will need, focusing on motivation first and content second will actually make it much easier to cover the content as they will have less of an uphill battle to drag students through the content and instead will be marching in front of their students who willingly and perhaps even excitedly move through content with the teacher rather than having to be forced kicking and screaming through each school year.
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References
Denenberg, Victor H, et al. “The Role of Dopamine in Learning, Memory, and Performance of a Water Escape Task.” Behavioural Brain Research, vol. 148, no. 1–2, 2004, pp. 73–78,
https://doi.org/10.1016/s0166-4328(03)00183-9.Goedhoop, Jessica, et al. “Anticipation of Appetitive Operant Action Induces Sustained Dopamine Release in the Nucleus Accumbens.” The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 43, no. 21, 2023, pp. 3922–3932, https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.1527-22.2023.
