Dopamine: treatment for sociopathy?

I think my brain produces unusually high amounts of dopamine -- and I think I've recently learned how to trigger my brain into producing more, sort of like mental masturbation. Apparently some women can think themselves to orgasm -- imagine thinking your way to mental ecstasy.

As I've mentioned before, I experience supersensitivity, and it is quite easy for me to achieve ecstasy based on external stimulus, particularly while experiencing rich food, beautiful music or imagery. Sometimes people think I am on drugs, but it's all me. Recently, perhaps due to some lifestyle changes, it has been especially easy for me to achieve ecstasy with relatively little prompting. It was happening so frequently that I started experimenting. First I tried to simply prolong and increase the intensity of the ecstasy when it came. After I got better at doing that, I successfully tried inducing it myself. I found that it was easiest to achieve ecstasy by focusing on an external stimulus as before, like music, food, or sunlight. After a while I was able to do it by focusing on a single sound or visual image and just trip on it. Now I can do it pretty much just by concentrating.

Perhaps this ability is just one more side benefit of the large degree of control I have over my mind and emotions. Or maybe there is a stronger link. Autism has also been linked with excessive amounts of dopamine in the brain, and is specifically associated with the autistic's stereotypical behavior. Physicians have achieved modest success in minimizing these behaviors by giving patients dopamine inhibitors. If sociopathy is on the autism spectrum, along with with asperger syndrome, then sociopaths may also have elevated amounts of dopamine, but not high enough to hamper social functioning.

Excessive amounts of dopamine seem to adversely affect behavior on the autism spectrum, but so do insufficient amounts. Sociopaths with lower levels of dopamine would presumably be lower functioning than those with higher levels of dopamine, because higher levels of dopamine would allow the sociopath's need for excitement and stimulation to be fulfilled by lower risk behavior, whereas sociopaths with less dopamine have to engage in riskier, more antisocial behavior to get the same high. At least one study has confirmed this intuition, that "low levels of dopamine-beta-hydroxylase (DBH) are associated with undersocialized conduct disorder and psychopathy whereas high levels of the enzyme were associated with socialized conduct disorder and secondary sociopathy." If individuals with autism are able to improve symptoms by decreasing dopamine levels, maybe criminal sociopaths could be treated by increasing dopamine levels.

Sociopaths = the good stuff

I posted this a while ago about a study suggesting that sociopaths have excessive amounts of dopamine. Another recent study done at Vanderbilt University has linked the excess dopamine in sociopaths to a hypersensitive reward system that releases as much as four times the normal amount of dopamine in response to either a perceived gain of money upon the successful completion of a task, or to chemical stimulants.

The researchers then suggest that the overactive reward system is to blame for a sociopath's impulsive, risk seeking behavior because "[t]hese individuals appear to have such a strong draw to reward to the carrot that it overwhelms the sense of risk or concern about the stick."

Really?

Apart from this conclusion seeming like a huge stretch, a blatant attempt to try to shoehorn scientific findings into one of the "known" "universal" "traits" of a "sociopath," this just seems wrong. From personal experience, I feel like my risk-seeking behavior stems from a low fear response, or a lack of natural anxiety in potentially dangerous, traumatic, or stressful situations. If I am not afraid of something, I am probably going to take more risks, just like those children who can't feel pain so end up shoving fingers in their eyes.

A hypersensitive reward system could explain why sociopaths are allegedly sex fiends, at least compared to the rest of the population. It could also explain why you'll see them at the top of their field, professionally speaking. Sociopaths are probably contributing to society in all sorts of random ways in order to trigger an enormous amount of dopamine flooding through their brain. Risk takers, though? Maybe we are, but I don't think because of this, particularly because an earlier study at Vanderbilt showed that low amounts of dopamine were highly correlated with risk taking and drug abuse. Or maybe we have to be goldilocks-esque about this and make sure dopamine levels are just right?