At 66, a ‘respectable’ age to slow down and retire, dopamine is having a moment. Discovered in 1957 by Swedish pharmacologist Arvid Carlsson, who won a Nobel Prize for the breakthrough, the neurotransmitter is thumping its squiggly little ‘tail’ and outrunning its fellow feel-good chemical cousins (serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins) in public consciousness. In fact, the reason we even know its physical structure is not through science, but because it’s a tattoo many non-scientists are getting and posting on social media (you can even buy it as a stick-on from Etsy.com).
Dopamine is in the news not because of any sudden breakthrough scientific research — researchers have been hard at work all along, slowly unravelling the mysteries of the neurochemical — but because of its ‘discovery’ by non-scientists. First, by the media over the past decade, fuelled by books on the subject, and more recently by social media, mostly over the years following the pandemic.
A little over a week ago, the Merriam-Webster dictionary updated its entry on the word, with examples just from 2023, from the world’s leading publications: The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, and more. Mostly though, it has been appropriated by the wellness industry, now pegged at $5.6 trillion, according to the non-profit Global Wellness Institute. Dopamine that is made in the brain, snuggles neatly into the space that sees an overlap of mental health, nutrition, and physical activity.
