Confession: I don't know Greek like AT ALL so reading Don's posts is usually me trying to brute force my way through Greek words by applying what I remember from college math/engineering classes.
It's important to be really careful when talking about DA in the context of motivation
Okay, D probably stands for dopamine since we're talking about that. But the A must be an abbreviation for something...
See, it can work both ways
DA together is dopamine! (not sure why it's abbreviated like that but I should have clarified!!)
Also in case it comes up elsewhere, DAT is Dopamine Transporter which is INVERSELY correlated with DA activity (DAT is responsible for dopamine reuptake, which means sucking it back up into the pre-synaptic neuron before the neurochemical message can be conveyed.)
DAT is important in motivation circuits and gets brought up a lot, but people can be confused when they find higher DAT activity means lower apparent motivation