Often times in college I find myself staring at a piece of paper and thinking, “huh?” I have found that this is the case for many other people as well; it’s just the nature of the beast. So, after you finish reading this post please feel free to refer back to these first two sentences, as you are not alone.
Have you ever wondered what makes your feel good, or what causes the feeling of euphoria that you get when something awesome happens to you? These feelings can be explained in the neurochemistry of your brain. The basis of neurochemistry and neurobiology centers largely on neurotransmitters and their respective receptors. Neurotransmitters are molecules that are released by nerve cells in your brain in order to transmit a signal to another cell. This cellular signaling is happening constantly in your body. It is the reason you are able to move your eyes along this page in order to read this post. It also is responsible for emotions and memory to name a few other things.
One of the most, if not the most, important neurotransmitter in your brain is called dopamine. Dopamine is very common; it is involved in your reward pathway, meaning that it is released when something good happens to you, causing a feeling of euphoria. Today however I will be discussing dopamine in a different light, we recently read an article in class that discussed the Akt/GSK3 signaling cascade. Your body has many different signaling cascades; each one of them can be seen as just a system that goes through different steps in order to produce some kind of response in your body. I know I know, at this point you might be like, “Ok that’s great and all but really why should we care what the science geek says?” Well this Akt/GSK3 signaling cascade just another way that dopamine is involved in your body. This cascade is started by the binding of dopamine to a D2 receptor, which is just a fancy name for one of the specialized receptors that dopamine has been known to bind to. Skipping all of the boring and confusing science details of the cascade I can say this: that if this cascade does not work correctly, we pay major consequences to our health.
The cascade working correctly means that there is a sufficient amount of signaling going on, but not too much or too little. Things can be thrown off if we have too high or too low of levels of dopamine in our brain. If dopamine is off, this whole system goes out of whack, and it has been shown that an out of whack Akt/GSK3 cascade can lead to conditions such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and even Parkinson’s disease. Although there are many different facets to these conditions, this Akt/GSK3 cascade has given scientists potential targets for new treatments to help with these disorders. Obviously, this could lead to major medical breakthroughs. Isn’t it interesting how science takes something so small like dopamine, and relates it to something so big?
Join the Dopamine Craze!
