Motivation is Dopamine
…and someone should write a song about that.
You know, it’s funny – as our knowledge of science increases (and I don’t just mean specialized knowledge…the amount of scientific knowledge that any individual has has increased drastically in the past few decades, despite complaints of scientific illiteracy in America), people still refrain from letting scientific jargon enter our public lexicon. Even when I talk to fellow neuroscience enthusiasts and psychologists, we keep the vocabulary of our conversation from veering into the esoteric. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I do think that it’s important to communicate science in terms everyone can understand. But we can change the terms that everyone can understand, slowly but surely.
My goal for this blog is to write at the intersection of art and science – fields that have, to me, always been deeply connected despite their different media. Check out Proust if you don’t believe me! And since the art form that I care about most is music, I may end up focusing the art side to that. So, songwriters – I dare you to write me a song about dopamine and its role in motivation that is not only tolerable but that, frankly, motivates me to listen to it. I know that sounds “meta”, but thinking about the brain is pretty much as meta as meta gets.
P.S. Please don’t expect every entry to be about both art and science. I have a firm belief that creativity can sprout only in a fertile grounding of various snippets of information. Plus, if I wanted every entry to be groundbreaking, I’d probably never post…and that wouldn’t be much fun now, would it?