Dopamine, paranormal belief, and the detection of meaningful stimuli.

Abstract in brief

• The study explores how dopamine (DA) affects perception and decision-making, particularly in relation to paranormal beliefs and experiences, by examining how it influences sensitivity and response tendencies in the brain.
• Results suggest that taking levodopa (which increases dopamine levels) decreased perceptual sensitivity in skeptics but had less effect on believers, making skeptics less prone to false alarms and believers slightly more conservative, contrary to the idea that DA generally enhances the signal-to-noise ratio.
• The findings imply that paranormal ideation might influence cognitive processing differently depending on dopamine levels and that assessing paranormal beliefs could be important in understanding how people detect meaningful stimuli amid noise.]