Gemma Speck

This fantastic little neurochemical or neurotransmitter and its role in the brain was a Swedish man called Arvid Carlsson.

He actually went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in synthesizing dopamine to treat Parkinson's, to treat diabetes.

depression, to treat post-stroke fatigue, to name a few things.

But here's the secret history for you.

Whilst he may have gotten all of the credit, and he definitely did do some fantastic, incredible work in his lifetime, the first person to actually demonstrate the presence of dopamine in the brain was a woman.

Her name was Catherine Montague.

She published her findings, her findings that basically were like, dopamine is real.

I have found it.

Here it is.

She published those findings six months before Carlson did.

And, you know, she wrote for the first time conclusively about this tiny chemical that is only produced by 0.0000005% of all brain cells, but seemingly has an excessive influence on behavior.

Dopamine, like before Catherine's research, because let's give her the credit here, was kind of like a Bigfoot Loch Ness monster kind of mystery to the psychology and neuroscience community, like maybe a little bit more serious.

Like they knew it existed.

They knew there was some interaction with other hormones like adrenaline that was going on.

But it was only in the 50s that the mystery and the role of dopamine in the central nervous system was revealed.

And it's gone on to be probably, this is crazy to say, but like the most famous neurotransmitter.

Now, when the release of dopamine is triggered, it acts really, really fast.

And it acts on different zone sites across the brain and body to make us do things that we think are

are helpful.

And the reason there is such a fuss around dopamine is because it drives so many of our behaviors as humans, even though our body and our brain doesn't necessarily make that much of it.