• Posted March 4, 2026

Brain Chemical Provides A 'Pep In Your Step,' Experiment Shows

Have you ever found a “spring in your step” when you’re walking toward something you enjoy – a favorite food, a good friend, an entertaining activity?

That’s a dopamine surge hitting your brain, a new study says.

Dopamine – a brain chemical associated with reward – appears to prompt people to move faster when they want something, researchers recently reported in the journal Science Advances.

It might seem like an odd observation, but it could lead to discoveries that help diagnose and treat conditions like Parkinson’s disease and depression, researchers said.

“Movements are a window to the mind,” lead researcher Colin Korbisch, a research assistant at the University of Colorado-Boulder, said in a news release.

In this case, movements provide insight into the behavior of dopaminergic neurons – the brain cells that release dopamine and thus shape a large range of human behavior.

“Normally, you can’t go into the brain and see what the dopaminergic neurons are doing, but movement could reflect those neural computations that are so difficult to disentangle,” Korbisch said.

For the study, researchers designed a simple experiment. They asked participants to “reach” for one of four targets on a computer screen, using a joystick-like device.

One target provided a simple reward each time a participant hit it — a flashing light and a beeping sound. Another target gave no reward, and the other two provided rewards that were less showy.

Participants tended to reach a little faster toward targets that were more likely to give a reward, the study found.

But more intriguingly, if they reached for a target unlikely to give a reward and they got one anyway, their reaching motion sped up afterward.

This boost occurred faster than the human eye could detect, just 220 milliseconds after the subjects heard the reward beep. But it still indicates that a pleasant surprise might give people a little extra pep.

The research team suspects that participants received a second jolt of dopamine from their unexpected reward – by contrast, when people knew they were getting a reward, they didn’t get that second surge of dopamine.

"Importantly, this effect wasn't tied to reward reception alone," Korbisch said. "If the outcome was certain and known to the individual, we saw no further increase in vigor."

Results also showed that if people got a string of rewards in a row, they started moving faster overall. But the reverse also was true – if they had nothing but bad luck, they slowed down.

This mirrors how people with depression tend to move more slowly, noted senior researcher Alaa Ahmed, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

“If you’ve had a good day, you’ll go faster. If you’ve had a bad day, you’ll move slower,” Ahmed said in a news release. “It’s basically that skip in your step.”

These results might seem rather obvious at first, she said.

“Anecdotally, we just feel that this is true,” Ahmed said. “When you go to the airport to pick up your parents, you may run to greet them. But if you’re picking up a colleague, you’re probably just going to walk.”

But the experiment shows how dopamine rewards your brain when you’ve received a reward and also registers when you’re doing something unrewarding, researchers said. Essentially, the brain uses dopamine to teach itself which options are worth pursuing and which can be ignored.

Researchers might one day be able to use these insights to track mood disorders, Ahmed said.

And since dopamine plays a crucial role in Parkinson’s disease, these results might also help inform understanding of that disorder as well, researchers said.

More information

Harvard Medical School has more on dopamine and reward.

SOURCE: University of Colorado-Boulder, news release, Feb. 27, 2026