Dopamine and mental experience

Dopamine and mental experience argues that mental experience arises from brain activity. Ratings of “pleasantness” of a meal correlate with dorsal striatal dopamine receptor occupancy. People with schizophrenia, who suffer from hyperdopaminergia, report that stimuli are difficult to shut out and Parkinson’s-like patients, who suffer from hypodopaminergia, report that nothing moves them—they cease to feel happy or sad. Animal studies suggest that drugs produce discriminable effects on their brains that might be like mental experiences in humans, but we have no information about those putative experiences. Without reliable means for evaluating the possible mental experiences of other animals, we should avoid the use of language that implies mental experience when discussing the behavioral neuroscience of nonhuman animals. The terms “reward-related learning” or “incentive learning” may be preferable over terms such as “pleasure” or “wanting” to describe the effects of increased synaptic concentrations of dopamine on the behavior of animals.