What Exactly Is Dopamine (Understand Dopamine and Understand Psychosis, The Biology of Psychosis)

An explanation of how aberrant dopamine release leads to altered salience attribution and the development of psychosis.

What is Psychosis? What is dopamine?, How does it relate to understanding psychosis? Well, understanding dopamine is key to comprehending the biology of psychosis.💡Anti-depressant Course: psycho.farm/antidepressant-course 📖 PsychoFarm's Treating Depression Book: a.co/d/3M0uFui ================ Follow PsychoFarm: 🔴SUBSCRIBE ► youtube.com/c/Psychofarm?sub_confirmation=1 🧠Mental Health Resources: psycho.farm/services-4 ➡️Instagram: instagram.com/thepsychofarm/ ➡️Tiktok: tiktok.com/@thepsychofarm ➡️Twitter: twitter.com/ThePsychoFARM ================ The video explains the cognitive model behind psychosis, which primarily involves aberrant dopamine release. What exactly is dopamine? Dopamine's role is to mediate the attribution of salience, converting neutral information into salient or aversive entities that grab attention and influence behavior. In psychosis, understanding dopamine becomes crucial as dopamine becomes the creator of salience instead of the mediator, leading to inappropriate assignment of significance to mundane events. The video uses the example of a bright blue butterfly in the woods to understand dopamine and how the release correlates with the degree of prediction error between top-down models and bottom-up sensory inputs. In psychosis, excessive dopamine release occurs independently of contextual stimuli, causing the brain to perceive random events as highly salient and demanding explanation. Now we can start to understand the biology of psychosis. As psychotic episodes persist, the brain tries to develop hypotheses to account for these anomalous prediction errors, leading to the development of delusions and potentially abandoning accurate models of the world. Understanding psychosis becomes essential as the longer the psychosis lasts, the more core beliefs are altered to accommodate the bizarre experiences, potentially resulting in profound delusional beliefs. The video aims to provide an intuitive way to understand psychosis and the cognitive processes underlying psychosis, setting the stage for later videos exploring specific symptoms of schizophrenia. ================ #psychosis #psychosisawareness #hearingvoices 0:00 You're in a strange part of our town 0:10 Intro to What is Psychosis? 0:40 Dopamine 3:29 Predictive Processing and Dopamine 6:16 Normal Dopamine Release vs. Psychosis 7:37 Why are these flies landing one me?! 9:09 Abandoning sane views