Skeptic Project

"The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance-the salience-of experience," says Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. "When there's too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn't be learning from.

The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. Without forgetting, they lose the ability to extract what's meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters. They start making connections that aren't real, or drowning in a sea of so many connections they lose the ability to stitch together any kind of coherent story."

This is very interesting because ecstacy/MDMA releases an over abundance of dopamine in a short time, therefore leading to the users having exaggerated feelings of emotions and importance of the time they spend on the drug. Often users can be seen showing interest and stating relevance to things non users see as meaningless and trivialities.

http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=MDMA+dopamine+release&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart

"MDMA acts as a releasing agent of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine.[102] It enters neurons via carriage by the monoamine transporters.[102] Once inside, MDMA inhibits the vesicular monoamine transporter, which results in increased concentrations of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine into the cytoplasm,[103]" from wiki