For years, starting about the turn of the century, dopamine as "the addiction neurotransmitter" became an ever more peddled idea among simplistic and reductionist ideas of neuroscience — both professional as well as lay.
Given the number of brain receptors for dopamine, that alone made it simplistic. Dopamine does a lot more than trigger desire, or even trigger memories of desire.
Indeed.
It turns out both it and serotonin are ALSO involved in epigenetic controls.
In turn, this means that both depression and anxiety, on the one hand, with serotonin, and addiction with dopamine may have a degree of non-genetic, but rather epigenetic, heritability. That would explain how something like alcohol, with modest-moderate physical addiction potential, but no more, can run in families yet skip around.
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