Dopamine Enhances Learning and Helps People Win When Gambling

People who take a dopamine drug are more likely to develop short-term learning skills and to be winners when involved in gambling, newscientist.com informs. Researchers at the University College London, UK, carried out a study and showed that dopamine drugs make learning quicker and more efficient. Their findings are published in the Nature journal.

Scientists based their study on the results of previous researches which found that dopamine drugs proved to be very beneficial on the learning skill in lab trials led on mice. Volunteers in the current study were divided into 3 groups: the ones in the first group received a dopamine drug, the ones in the second group received a drug which cut the amount of dopamine in the brain and the ones in the third group received a placebo.

Then, participants in the study were asked to play a computer game in which they had to choose one of two unmatched symbols present in pairs. Many such pairs of two unmatched symbols were showed to the subjects. They knew nothing about the symbols whatsoever. However, what the participants did not know was that one of the symbols in the pairs gave them a 80% chance of winning £ 1, while choosing the other symbol in the pair gave them only a 20% chance to win the money.

According to the expectations, the volunteers who received a dopamine drug were the most in the study that picked the winning symbol as compared to their counterparts who took a drug to lower their brain's dopamine levels or the ones in the placebo group.

Scientists who carried out the study explained how dopamine enhances learning. They showed that dopamine works by giving the learners or gamblers who succeed in a test or win a gamble a reward, namely the dopamine "high" state. This will help them remember for sure the choices they made next time they have to resort their learning skill or gamble.

"It's a system for minimizing prediction errors. So if you get an unexpected reward, lots of dopamine is released, and that's how dopamine drives learning," explained Chris Frith at University College London, who was involved in the study.

Besides the fact that dopamine enhances learning and winning in gambling, drugs that contain dopamine are heavy involved in addiction. This could explain why Parkinson's disease patients who receive dopamine drugs as main medication become very often addicted to gambling.


Dopamine is involved in all types of heavy addiction, from drug to sex, exercise or sex addiction. When taking cocaine or amphetamines, the levels of artificially induced dopamine in the addicted individuals' bodies rise and produce the so-called "high" state. In the other types of addictions mentioned, natural levels of dopamine rise in the body and this is the brain's way of reinforcing behavior, explains Chris Frith.

"This is a convincing explanation for the mechanism by which gambling addiction develops," stated Gerhard Meyer at the University of Bremen, who has researched the link between dopamine and addiction.