Please stop calling dopamine the ‘pleasure chemical’

Dopamine is one of the most hyped brain chemicals, supposedly linked to everything from sex to gambling. It’s common to read, as Business Insider claimed last week, that dopamine is “the pleasure chemical” — but that’s not true, and the idea was overturned long ago.“I have friends who have dopamine tattoos because they think it means pleasure,” says Arif Hamid, a Gray Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and postdoctoral researcher at Brown Uni