Dopa Mine was born in September 2007. She is a fictional character in a novel currently being written, which is the second one in the 'Magenta Series'. The Magenta books are about brain and mental disorders. The first one, 'Magenta and the matches', deals with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, whereas bipolar is the subject of the current one.
Dopa Mine is a performance artist, expressing what the chemicals floating around in our brain do within a human on a molecular level as well as describing how these chemical reactions out themselves in a person's cognition, emotions and behaviour.
Dopamine (not Dopa Mine :-) ) is the chemical in our brains that provides feedback when learning new things, is getting you hooked onto pleasurable experiences, instilling the lust to experience it again, and again...and again. It is also responsible for inducing the sense of grandeur, the feeling of invincibility, making us indulge in (possibly) dangerous activities, which - if we survive them - will feed back into the circle of showering us with positive feedback. And all this depends on the amount of dopamine.
Needless to say, there IS a quite a dark side, too, because if one overdoses on dopamine, paranoia will hit you full force.... The 'adventure' of simply crossing the street to pick up some milk from the nearest supermarket will be displayed as a full length crappy horror movie on your inbuilt mental screen. And I am talking 3-D, plus the physical reactions...
So, all in all the most fascinating neurotransmitter, if you ask me...
