Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Most Replayed Moment: The Role of Dopamine in Addiction and Motivation - Anna Lembke About this episode In today’s moment, renowned neuroscientist and author, Anna Lembke, explores the fascinating science of dopamine and its impact on our behaviour. Discover why dopamine is fundamental to survival, how it drives pleasure and motivation, and why we are more vulnerable to addiction than we think.
Neuroscientist Anna Lembke is the author of bestselling book, Dopamine Nation. As a professor of psychiatry and the Medical Director of the Stanford Addiction Medicine program, she has become a leading expert on the brain’s reward system. Her work explores how the balance of pleasure and pain in the brain can lead to addiction and what happens when we overstimulate our reward pathways in the modern world.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Steven Bartlett? You wrote one of the most iconic, well-known books about dopamine, which propelled the subject matter of dopamine into the public consciousness. But I guess the most important question I should ask you is, why does dopamine matter?
0:19 Speaker 01 Ah, good question, good, good place to start. I mean, dopamine matters because it's fundamental to our survival, right? So it's the chemical that we make in our brain that tells us this is something we should approach, explore, investigate. So it's, it's really almost the survival chemical.
0:39 Steven Bartlett? So what is dopamine? If you had to explain it to a 10-year-old, how would you go about explaining it?
0:44 Speaker 01 So dopamine is a chemical that we make in our brain. It has many different functions, but one of its most important functions is that it helps us experience pleasure, reward, and motivation. It may be even more important for the motivation to do things than it is for the pleasure itself. So for example, there's a very famous experiment in which rats were engineered to have no dopamine in the brain's reward pathway. And the scientists discovered that if they put food in the rat's mouth, the rat would eat the food, would seem to get some pleasure from the food, if you can determine that from watching a rat eat, which I think they felt like they could.
1:29 Speaker 01 But if you put the food even a body length away, the rat will starve to death. The idea being that without dopamine, we're not motivated to seek out the things that we need for our basic survival.
1:43 Steven Bartlett? That's crazy. So you get a rat, you put the food an inch from its mouth, and it will starve to death because it doesn't have dopamine, the dopamine required to just reach out and eat.
1:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, essentially. Maybe it's not an inch, maybe it's a little more than an inch, but the idea being that dopamine is necessary to be motivated, to do the work, to get the thing that we need.
2:08 Steven Bartlett? Having an understanding of dopamine, how might that improve my life?
2:12 Speaker 01 Having a basic understanding of how dopamine works, how we process pleasure and pain, and also what happens with dopamine as we go from adaptive recreational use to maladaptive addictive use is something that is really useful, especially for those of us living in the modern world, where now we're exposed to so many reinforcing substances and behaviours that we've all become vulnerable to the problem of addiction.
2:40 Steven Bartlett? And what are the biggest misconceptions on the subject of dopamine? Because it's kind of thrown around in society. I see it in my group chats, people saying, "I need more dopamine," or whatever, or, you know, "that person just craves dopamine." What are the biggest misconceptions you've come across?
2:54 Speaker 01 The main misconception is that somehow we can get addicted to dopamine. We're not getting addicted to dopamine itself. Dopamine is neither good nor bad. It's a signal to tell us whether or not something that we're doing is potentially useful for our survival. And also, it's related to what we predicted about how rewarding or pleasurable something would be. And so it's really, you know, I sort of, sometimes I joke, it's like the reward theory of relativity, dopamine is, in the sense that pleasure and pain really are truly relative to one another. And so dopamine gives us information about where we are in that relativity scale
3:38 Speaker 01 between pleasure and pain.
3:40 Steven Bartlett? And when you say relative, you mean, I mean, it's quite fitting. For anyone that can't see, we have a set of scales on the table, and scales are relative to each other because if you pour in one end, the other end goes up. And if you pour in the other end, the other end goes up and this end goes down. And when you say relative, that's what you're describing, right?
3:57 Speaker 01 Yes, that's what I'm describing, yes.
3:59 Steven Bartlett? Okay. And what activities that I do every day have an impact on my dopamine?
4:06 Speaker 01 Well, probably almost everything, you know, in some ways. I mean, every time we are doing something that's pleasurable, reinforcing, rewarding, that will affect dopamine. It's really the primary signal that lets us know that this thing is potentially important for our survival, as I mentioned. But, you know, even aversive stimuli can trigger dopamine.
4:33 Steven Bartlett? What's aversive?
4:34 Speaker 01 Oh, something that's painful or not pleasurable. Dopamine gets involved in that equation. Anything that's novel or new is something that triggers our dopamine in our reward pathway. Dopamine is fundamental for movement, so not just pleasure and reward, but also movement. So, for example, Parkinson's disease, which is a disease related to stiffness and tremor, is caused by a depletion of dopamine in a part of the brain called the substantia nigra. And as dopamine gets depleted in that part of the brain, people lose the ability to move their bodies. And it's probably no coincidence that the same neurotransmitter that is so important
5:18 Speaker 01 for pleasure, reward, motivation, is also really important for movement, because most organisms have to locomote toward the object of their desire. We want that thing, we have to exert effort, right? We have to put in the work to go get it. But in the world today, we really don't have to do that, right? We can swipe right, we can swipe left, and all of a sudden, it magically appears at the touch of a finger. And that's very confusing for our brains, because that's not how we evolved. We really evolved for having to do quite a bit of upfront work for a tiny little bit of reward.
5:54 Steven Bartlett? I just want to, before we move on, talk about this point you said, because I think it's quite foundational to everything we're going to talk about, about dopamine being relative to pain.
6:03 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
6:04 Steven Bartlett? And I have this set of scales in front of me, and here I have some chemicals that are likely to produce dopamine in my brain, I believe.
6:12 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm, yes.
6:13 Steven Bartlett? Alcohol.
6:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:15 Steven Bartlett? I have some rum, I have some whiskey, I have some vodka. And can you explain to me, using this rum, whiskey, and vodka, how dopamine is relative to pain and what's going on in my brain?
6:25 Speaker 01 Sure.
6:26 Steven Bartlett? Okay, I'll slide this over to you.
6:27 Speaker 01 Oh, okay. So, one of the most exciting findings in neuroscience in the past 75 years is that pleasure and pain are co-located in the brain. So the same parts of the brain that process pleasure also process pain. And in a very simple, reductionist kind of way, they work like opposite sides of a balance. So imagine that deep in your brain's reward pathway, which is another exciting discovery, right? That there's this dedicated reward pathway of the brain that consists broadly speaking of the prefrontal cortex, which is this large gray matter area right behind our foreheads that's so important for future planning, for delayed gratification, for appreciating
7:11 Speaker 01 future consequences. You might think of it as like the brakes on the car, if we're going to analogize to an engine. And then, deep, you know, in the brain, we've got what we call the limbic areas, or the emotion brain. And there you have the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area that are rich in dopamine-releasing neurons, right? And they act like the accelerator on the car. So when you've got a healthy, functioning brain, you've got enough accelerator, but not too much, right? So enough dopamine being released, but not too much. And you've got a healthy prefrontal cortex putting the brakes on that dopamine release.
7:52 Speaker 01 When people become addicted, there's either a problem with the brakes, the prefrontal cortex, or the accelerator, the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area, or both, right? What we're finding is that there's actually a disconnect. So there are large neuronal circuits and pathways between those deep limbic structures and the prefrontal cortex that literally get severed or disconnected when people become addicted. As we think about pleasure and pain being co-located in the same parts of the brain, working like opposite sides of the balance... In order to understand what happens in the addicted brain is to appreciate that there are fundamental rules governing this balance.
8:36 Speaker 01 And one of the most important rules is that the balance wants to remain level. It does not want to be tilted very long to the side of either pleasure or pain. And in fact, what our brain does is first tilt an equal and opposite amount to whatever the initial stimulus is. So I'm going to try to illustrate that here. So let's say our initial stimulus is alcohol. Now, alcohol works through its own chemical pathway. It works on our endogenous opioid system, the opioids that we make. We have receptors for opioids in our brains. It works on our endogenous GABA system, which is our calming neurotransmitter. And at the end of the day, it releases dopamine in the reward pathway. So any potentially addictive substance will release dopamine in the reward pathway.
9:21 Speaker 01 The more that's released and the faster that's released in a given individual, the more likely that substance is to be addictive. Now, another important concept here is what we call drug of choice, which is to say what releases a lot of dopamine in your brain may not release a lot of dopamine in my brain and vice versa. Which is this idea that people have predilections to different kinds of drugs. And by the way, people can get addicted to behaviors, too. I should emphasize that.
9:50 Steven Bartlett? When you say drug of choice, you mean the brain has a particular sensitivity to that drug in terms of dopamine?
9:58 Speaker 01 Yes. The more dopamine that's released, the faster that it's released, the more likely that drug is to be addictive for a given individual.
10:05 Steven Bartlett? So you're holding some whiskey there?
10:07 Speaker 01 I'm holding some whiskey.
10:08 Steven Bartlett? There could be a brain that is very sensitive to whiskey, and there could be a different brain that you could pour all the whiskey in you like, and the dopamine response is sort of limited.
10:18 Speaker 01 Exactly. And for many of my patients who become addicted to alcohol, they will tell you that from the first moment they had alcohol, they knew they were either in trouble or had met their best friend or some combination. It was a very potent experience for them. All right, so let's go ahead and put this on the pleasure side of the balance. Dopamine is being released, but no sooner has that happened than my brain will work very hard to restore a level balance. And by the way, a level balance is what neuroscientists call homeostasis. Okay. And one of the overarching physiologic drives for all living organisms is to return to homeostasis.
10:59 Speaker 01 Homeostasis is that parameter of what's often called affordances, or states of being that are adaptive and healthy for the organism. For example, like, we have a certain homeostasis of body temperature, and if we go much beyond that, either too high or too low, we will disintegrate and die, right? So, homeostasis is that states of being that are compatible with existence and potentially advantageous to.
11:27 Steven Bartlett? Sort of baseline level.
11:28 Speaker 01 That's right.
11:29 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
11:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, baseline level. And by the way, we're always releasing dopamine at a kind of tonic baseline level in our brains. I sometimes think of it as the heartbeat of the brain.
11:36 Steven Bartlett? So, what's happened here for people that can't see is you've poured a little bit of whiskey into one end of the scale, the pleasure side of the scale, and the other side of the scale has risen, because now there's whiskey in the pleasure side, which I guess has released dopamine.
11:49 Speaker 01 Exactly. So now, we've released dopamine in the reward pathway.
11:53 Steven Bartlett? Okay. Because the pain side went up, does that mean there's now less pain in the brain?
11:57 Speaker 01 Well, I think, you know, again, this is a metaphor. It's an oversimplification. The idea here is just, when we press on the pleasure side, we're releasing dopamine in the reward pathway and experiencing pleasure.
12:09 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
12:10 Speaker 01 But no sooner has that happened than our brain will try to compensate or adapt to increase dopamine firing by down-regulating dopamine transmission, for example, by involuting postsynaptic dopamine receptors.
12:24 Steven Bartlett? What does that mean?
12:25 Speaker 01 Okay. So, our brain is a bunch of wires, you know, that conduct these electrical signals, and these long spindly cells are called neurons. And the thing about neurons is that they don't actually touch end to end. There's a little gap or space between them and that gap is called the synapse. And that gap or synapse is bridged by what we call neurotransmitters. And dopamine is one of those neurotransmitters. Okay. And when the presynaptic neuron pulses and releases dopamine, it crosses the synapse and binds to a receptor on the postsynaptic neuron, which either continues or aborts that electrical signal. Does that make sense?
13:06 Steven Bartlett? Yes.
13:06 Speaker 01 Okay. So one of the ways that our brain can decrease the effects of dopamine, decrease dopamine transmission, is by involuting or taking inside the neuron, the postsynaptic receptor. That way, when dopamine is released, it has nowhere to bind.
13:23 Steven Bartlett? Oh, okay. So it's like removing the docking station.
13:26 Speaker 01 Exactly.
13:27 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
13:27 Speaker 01 Very good. It's removing the docking station. So essentially, getting back to our scale, we've, you know, ingested alcohol, we've increased dopamine firing in the reward pathway. But remember, our pleasure-pain balance wants to return to the level position, level with the ground, homeostasis. So it's going to decrease dopamine transmission by, for example, involuting those postsynaptic dopamine receptors. But one thing about the brain in its process of trying to get back to homeostasis, and again, I like to think of this neuroadaptation process as these gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again. You don't have gremlins here, you have these little rocks. But let's go ahead and put a rock on the pain side of the balance. And these rocks are our friends, right?
14:11 Speaker 01 Their job is to level the balance. Because remember, we got to go back to homeostasis. So I'm going to put a rock on and you're going to see, oh, my gosh, it overshot, right? Now, I've got it pressed down on the pain side of the balance. But that's exactly what happens in our brains. In this process of neuroadaptation, those gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance don't get off as soon as the balance is level. They stay on until we're tilted and equal in opposite amount.
14:37 Steven Bartlett? So is that what a hangover is or a come down? As they would say when people take drugs, they say, I have a come down.
14:44 Speaker 01 Exactly. That's exactly what it is. That's the hangover, the come down, the blue Monday. Or on a much smaller scale, just that moment of craving, right? That moment of wanting to have one more shot, right?
14:57 Steven Bartlett? Why does it overshoot? Why can't it just perfectly hit homeostasis?
15:01 Speaker 01 Such a great question.
15:03 Steven Bartlett? Because then we'd feel fine.
15:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, why did Mother Nature do that to us? So cruel, right?
15:08 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
15:09 Speaker 01 Okay. I'm going to tell you an evolutionary just so story. What we mean by that is we don't really know why, you know, this mechanism exists. But from an evolutionary perspective, if you're living in a world of scarcity and ever-present danger, this is the perfect mechanism to make sure that we're never satisfied with what we have, that we're always wanting more. It's made us the ultimate seekers.
15:37 Steven Bartlett? Okay, because immediately after getting something, I'm now feeling a lack of pleasure and I'm at a deficit, you know, on the pain side of the scale, which means that I'm going to go seeking out more dopamine. And in a world where everything is quite scarce, that could mean going on another four-hour hunt the next day to go kill a gazelle or something.
15:55 Speaker 01 Perfect. You've got, yeah, you've got it perfectly.
15:58 Steven Bartlett? Interesting.
15:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:00 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so that's going to motivate me because this gets so... Jesus, people that have hangovers don't seem very motivated.
16:07 Speaker 01 Right, so now that's it. So why is that, right? It's because alcohol is a product of human engineering that releases so much dopamine all at once in the reward pathway that our brains are reeling to compensate, right? We really weren't evolved for this much pleasure with this much easy access. As you said yourself, we were really evolved for, to have to do quite a lot of work up front and to be hungry and to be lonely and to be tired and then get a little bit of reward that would then bring us back up to homeostasis. So really, we were evolved to be pressing on the pain side of the balance
16:52 Speaker 01 in our effort to find pleasure. And then when we find it, that little bit of food or clothing or shelter or a mate would bring us back to the level position. Does that make sense?
17:02 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, so you're telling me essentially that we're all wired to be addicted.
17:08 Steven Bartlett? Because if this is how our brain works in a world, it's designed to seek out more dopamine. But the problem we have now is we have all this synthetic dopamine effectively, like this synthetic chemicals and synthetic things and, you know, an internet that is wiring us to give us so much dopamine so easily. That means that our brains are effectively like mismatched to the world that we live in. And therefore, wired to be addicted. Yeah, I think you actually said that. I found a quote you said in an interview where you said, "We're all wired to be addicted. And if you're not addicted yet, it's right around the corner."
17:42 Speaker 01 Right, coming to a website near you, yes. I guess I would, I would qualify that a little bit by saying, "We're wired for survival in a world of scarcity. That's not the world we live in now. We live in a world of overwhelming overabundance. And so there is a mismatch between this ancient wiring that has us relentlessly pursuing pleasure in order to survive and a world that's so infused with pleasure and so many rewarding stimuli that now we're overwhelming our reward system and our brains are reeling in response to try to compensate."
18:17 Steven Bartlett? So what happens to this scale then in such a world where I can get a big hit of dopamine all the time using some of these synthetic things or the internet or pornography or whatever else? What's going on with this scale over and over again?
18:28 Speaker 01 Okay, great. So let me get there. Let me first say though, that remember, after we do something that's highly pleasurable, our brain compensates with neuroadaptation, tilting an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain and then restoring our balance back to the level position, right? Or what we call homeostasis. So this doesn't last forever, right? It's to pleasure, then it's to pain, then it's back to the level position. But if we continue to consume our drug of choice over days to weeks to months to years, and we add in a whole bunch of other drugs and now we're consuming, you know, pornography and smoking pot
19:08 Speaker 01 and eating donuts and, you know, you name it, all at the same time, then essentially what happens is those gremlins on the pain side of the balance end up camped out there.
19:23 Steven Bartlett? For anyone that can't see, she put all of the rocks into the pain side to represent all of the addictive behaviours that this individual has now taken on.
19:31 Speaker 01 Right. And now we've entered addicted brain, by which I mean that we've changed our hedonic or joy set point to the side of pain. Now we need more and more of our drug in more potent forms, not to get high and feel good, but just to level the balance and feel normal. And this is not going to be enough. To level the balance, I would have to like, keep filling this much more than this container can hold. And that would be in pursuit really of just trying to level that balance so that we can feel normal. And when we're not using, we're walking around with a balance tilted toward the side of
20:12 Speaker 01 pain, experiencing the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance or behaviour, which are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, depression and craving.
20:24 Steven Bartlett? So if I managed to get enough vodka, whiskey, rum, and pour it into the pleasure side of the scale, now that all the rocks are in the pain side of the scale, and managed to outweigh it, it would, it would, what would then happen?
20:38 Speaker 01 More rocks.
20:39 Steven Bartlett? More rocks would be added?
20:40 Speaker 01 Yes, more, more rocks.
20:41 Steven Bartlett? So momentarily, I would maybe be in a little bit of pleasure.
20:45 Speaker 01 Yes.
20:45 Steven Bartlett? But then my brain would remove those docking stations again, remove more of them, more rocks would go in and I'd slam down on the pain side again, which means I need more alcohol to try and get up to pleasure. Okay. So really you wanna, you wanna like dopamine fast, or you need, you need to just balance this. And this is so difficult because of the world we live in. It's almost, it's, it's funnily enough, because this little scales experiment analogy here is giving me a huge amount of empathy for people that are addicts.
21:14 Speaker 01 Oh gosh, I'm so glad you said that, because I think that is the key to empathy for the disease of addiction, as well as for people with the disease having empathy for themselves, is recognising that on some level,
21:29 Speaker 01 It's out of their control, right? Because when we are tilted to the side of pain, the overwhelming drive to restore a level balance or restore homeostasis as quickly as possible overwhelms any other rational thought about the consequences of my drug use, right? It's just like, get back to the level position because if I do that, I'll at least feel temporarily better.
21:54 Steven Bartlett? What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.
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