Training Your Brain for Dopamine: A Designer’s Eye, A Psychologist’s Take

Sharan Kamireddy is an interior designer who spent years in design school learning to see the world differently, noticing what most people walk past, decoding what most people only feel. I’m a psychology student who studies why humans think, feel, and behave the way they do. This piece started as a conversation between us and turned into something we both couldn’t stop thinking about.

There’s a line Sharankamireddy said, almost casually, early on that I haven’t been able to shake: it never switches off.

He wasn’t talking about anxiety or obsession. He was talking about perception — specifically, what happens to your brain after years of design training. You stop moving through the world the way most people do. You start seeing the architecture of experience: why a room feels the way it does, why a film scene lands before the dialogue starts, why one chair feels inviting while another feels cold.

And once that happens, there’s no going back.

How Perception Gets Rewired

Before design school, Sharan moved through life the way most of us do, watching films for the story, entering spaces without really reading them, picking up objects without thinking about what they were communicating.

Then something changed. Permanently.

“A movie I watched before design school feels completely different to when I watch it now,” he says. “Earlier, I only followed the story. Now I notice framing, lighting, pacing, textures, negative space, costume palettes, transitions, emotions created through colour, and even why a particular scene makes me feel a certain way.”

Same film. Different brain.

That’s not just a metaphor. In psychology, what Sharan went through has a name: perceptual learning. It’s what happens when structured, repeated exposure to a domain doesn’t just add knowledge, it reorganises how the brain extracts information from the world. You stop consciously deciding to notice things. The noticing becomes automatic.

Which is exactly why it never switches off. Once your brain builds a perceptual category, stimuli start getting sorted into it before you’ve even decided to look. Radiologists see disease patterns before they’ve consciously scanned. Musicians catch pitch errors in casual conversation. Designers spot hierarchy problems on restaurant menus while waiting for their food.

The film example is a good one because it makes this visible. You can watch the same movie twice, years apart, and have a completely different experience, not because the film changed, but because you did.

The Body That Thinks Before You Do

Here’s the thing about design school that most people don’t expect: it doesn’t just train the eye.

Sharan describes touching materials unconsciously everywhere he goes — stone, fabric, wood, metal, textured paint, unfinished concrete. Not to use them, to understand them. “I want to feel it, decode it,” he says. “To other people, that probably looks weird.”

It does look weird. But only because most people touch things for a reason- to open, to lift, to carry. What Sharan is doing is different. He’s touching things to know them.

There’s a concept in embodied cognition called haptic intelligence, basically the idea that your hands do a kind of thinking that runs ahead of conscious reasoning. When you drag your fingers across unfinished concrete, you’re not just collecting data to send upstairs. The texture, temperature, and resistance are already generating a response, aesthetic, emotional, visceral, before any of it becomes a thought.

Designers seem to develop this more deliberately than most people. They learn to treat the body as an instrument of understanding, not just a means of getting from one place to another.

The Assignment That Had Nothing to Do with Objects

First year of design school. Sharan’s class was given an assignment that seemed, at the time, completely pointless.

Collect 20 man-made objects and 20 natural objects. Document their colour, texture, and smell.

“So all of us walked around campus touching random surfaces, tracing patterns onto paper, smelling leaves, bricks, soil, metal, plastic, fabric,” he recalls. “None of us really understood why we were doing it.”

Later, he figured it out. The assignment had nothing to do with objects. It was teaching them to slow down to notice the world deeply enough to actually see it.

From a psychology standpoint, this is closer to mindfulness training than anything else, and I mean that technically, not spiritually. Most of us move through the day in a kind of low-grade autopilot. The brain is efficient; it doesn’t want to fully process things it thinks it already knows. A door handle. A patch of concrete. A shadow on a wall. These get categorised and filed before you’ve really looked at them. Psychologists call it perceptual habituation — familiarity doesn’t make things invisible, but it does make them cheap to process.

That assignment was meant to be a pattern interrupt. It made ordinary things feel novel again, which is cognitively expensive, in the best possible way. The object wasn’t the point. The slowing down was.

Where the Dopamine Actually Comes From

Designers, Sharan says, experience dopamine through discovery. Noticing a beautifully solved problem. Understanding why a system works. Finding intention hiding in a detail. Decoding the thinking inside something well-made.

“A well-designed book cover, a clever wayfinding system, a perfectly paced film sequence, these create genuine excitement,” he says. “Our brains are constantly connecting observations to possibilities.”

That’s true. But the dopamine part is worth looking at more carefully because it’s pointing at something more interesting than just pleasure.

There’s a theory in psychology, George Loewenstein’s information gap theory, that says dopamine doesn’t actually respond to rewards. It responds to the sense that a gap exists between what you know and what you could know. The excitement doesn’t arrive after you understand something. It kicks in the moment you sense there’s something there to understand.

Designers, through years of training, have become unusually good at detecting those gaps. They walk into a room and feel something is slightly off before they can name it. They pick up a book and sense the cover isn’t working before they’ve figured out why. That feeling — the gap registering — is the hit. The understanding is almost secondary.

And this is why it compounds. The more you’ve learned to see, the more gaps you find in everything around you. The world doesn’t get simpler. It gets more interesting.

The Archive That Becomes Intuition

There’s something else designers build over time, and Sharan describes it well.

“We subconsciously archive solutions, patterns, structures, emotions, layouts, behaviours,” he says. “So that one day, when we face a similar challenge, we have a deeper understanding of how to approach it. We start craving that process. We crave details. We crave intention.”

Cognitive psychology has a name for what’s actually happening here: chunking. It was first studied in chess masters, who don’t just know more than novices; they store things differently. A grandmaster doesn’t see eight separate pieces in a formation. They see a single recognisable pattern that carries meaning about threat, strategy, and opportunity all at once.

What Sharan calls an archive is closer to a chunked perceptual vocabulary. A designer doesn’t just remember a book cover they admired. They’ve absorbed it, the felt relationship between weight, whitespace, and typeface, and the specific emotional effect that combination produces. When a similar problem shows up later, that understanding doesn’t surface as a memory. It fires as an intuition.

This is also why experienced designers can be frustratingly hard to interrogate. “Why does this work?” is sometimes a genuinely difficult question to answer, because the knowing lives somewhere below language.

The Part Nobody Warns You About

Sharan ends with something generous. This way of seeing, he says, shouldn’t belong only to designers. Once you train yourself to notice things deeply, the world becomes more stimulating, more meaningful, more alive. You stop moving through life passively. You become present.

Perhaps that’s the real dopamine, not constant entertainment, but learning how to truly notice.

I agree with all of it. But I want to come back to that line from the beginning.

It never switches off.

That’s worth sitting with longer than Sharan did. Training your attention isn’t a tap you turn on for pleasant Sunday walks and switch off when you’re tired. There’s a version of this that’s genuinely enriching, richer textures, deeper experiences, more beauty in ordinary things. And there’s a version that’s quietly exhausting, where you can’t sit in a badly designed space without something in you resisting, or watch a poorly paced film without your brain fighting the whole way through.

Perceptual sensitivity is a real advantage. But sensitivity cuts both ways. The same training that lets you find beauty in the weight of a book cover also means you’ll feel the failure of its opposite, and you won’t always be able to choose not to.

So yes, learn to notice. But know what you’re actually signing up for.

You’re not just adding a skill. You’re changing the instrument through which you experience everything else.

And that changes everything.

Sharan is an interior designer and visual thinker. His collaborator is a psychology student. They write together because the best ideas usually live at the edge of two different ways of seeing.

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