Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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Chocolate, they didn't look at milk versus dark chocolate, but chocolate will increase your baseline level of dopamine 1.5 times, okay? So it's a pretty substantial increase in dopamine. It's transient, it goes away after a few minutes or even a few seconds. I'll explain what determines the duration in a minute, but 1.5 times for chocolate. Sex, both the pursuit of sex and the act of sex increases dopamine two times. So it's a doubling above baseline. Now, of course, there's going to be variation there, but that's the average increase in baseline dopamine caused by sex. Later I will talk about how the different aspects of the so-called arousal arc, the different aspects of sex, believe it or not, have a differential impact on dopamine. But for now, as a general theme or activity, sex doubles the amount of dopamine circulating in your blood.

Tengo un amigo que cuando escuchó por primera vez el podcast del neurocientífico de Stanford, Andrew Huberman, me dijo: “El tío mola mucho y es una pasada escucharle… una pena que se lo invente todo”. El comentario me hizo bastante gracia porque entendí rápidamente que lo que realmente estaba queriendo decir es que las explicaciones de Huberman sobre cómo funciona el cerebro son tan elegantes, sencillas e intuitivas que parecen ciencia ficción. Leyendo The Molecule of More (libro recomendado por el propio Huberman en uno de los episodios del podcast) he tenido la misma sensación ya que parece imposible que un único neurotransmisor, la dopamina, sea la explicación de tantos y tan dispares comportamientos humanos. It really, really does sound and feel like: "The four-legged piece of furniture called chair is placed around the round wooden object called table in what we call a living room. That's the room in which people live or spend most of their free time when at home." It makes one cringe from the bottom of this ambiguous thing called soul.

The Levers in Our Brains – Dopamine and social reward

The crux of our behaviour boils down to two outlooks we humans have – here & now matters (which the authors refer to as the H&N circuit) and the future (our desires and actions). Dopamine is largely what determines how we approach the future – high dopamine defining the drive. Dopamine circuits are in two categories – ones which determine our desires and the other which exerts control over our actions. One wonders if all of the author's interpretations are as inelegant and rudimentary as his take on the concept of eudaimonia. Our brain simply loves to get high and for a long time we couldn´t get good stuff from the outer world ( it must have been terrible) when we were still stonagey and before, but we had those fine centers for own opioids, own cannabinoids, but especially the other hormones that aren´t so fancy. No matter where we look, to the love in our beds, to the digital shopping card, enemies and frenemies at work, what we love and hate about political parties, we are wired to react like animals. Dopamine is also vitally important for movement. I'll explain the neural circuits for dopamine and mindset, and dopamine in movement, in a moment. But in diseases like Parkinson's or Lewy body dementia, which is similar to Parkinson's in many ways, there's a depletion or death of dopamine neurons at a particular location in the brain, which leads to shaky movements, challenges in speaking, challenges in particular in initiating movement. And because dopamine is depleted elsewhere too, people with Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia also experience drops in motivation and affect, meaning mood. They tend to get depressed, and so on. When those people are properly treated, they can, not always, but they can recover some fluidity of movement, some ability to initiate movement. And almost without question, those people feel better psychologically, not just because they can move, but also because dopamine impacts mood and motivation. Well, it is great, except that by layering together all these things to try and achieve that dopamine release and by getting a big peak in dopamine, you're actually increasing the number of conditions required to achieve pleasure from that activity again. And so there is a form of this where sometimes you do all the things that you love to get the optimal workout. You listen to your favorite music. You go at your favorite time of day. You have your preworkout drink, if that's your thing. You do all the things that give you that best experience of the workout for you. But there's also a version of this where sometimes you don't do the dopamine-enhancing activities. You don't ingest anything to increase your dopamine. You just do the exercise.

Not only does it not give them a peak, their baseline gets lower and lower because they're depleting dopamine more and more and more, and we've seen this over and over again. When people get addicted to something, then they're not achieving much pleasure at all. You can even see this with video games. People will play a video game, they love it, it's super exciting to them, and then they'll keep playing and playing and playing, and either one of two things happens, typically both. First of all, I always say addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. So oftentimes what will happen is the person only has excitement and can achieve dopamine release to the same extent doing that behavior and not other behaviors, and so they start losing interest in school, they start losing interest in relationships, they start losing interest in fitness and well-being, and it depletes their life. If ever you've interacted with somebody who just doesn't seem to have any drive, they've given up, or if you've interacted with somebody who seems to have endless drive and energy, what you are looking at there in those two circumstances is without question a difference in the level of dopamine circulating in their system. There will be other factors too, but the level of dopamine is the primary determinant of how motivated we are, how excited we are, how outward facing we are, and how willing we are to lean into life and pursue things. Research has found that reading novels improves our brain functions on a variety of levels, including the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes and flex your imagination. It also boosts our innovative thinking skills. Take it from Elon Musk, arguably one of the most innovative minds of our time. He's said that growing up, he spent more than 10 hours a day pouring through science fiction novels. In today's rapidly changing world, innovation is necessary for any business to stay competitive. Sistemul dopaminic s-a dezvoltat pentru a ne motiva să supraviețuim. Activarea ei provoacă dorință, entuziasm, speranță. Fără ea nu putem depune efort. This is a very interesting book on how just one chemical – Dopamine influences so much of our behaviour. The undue influence Dopamine exerts is amazing considering the fraction the Dopamine circuit occupies in our brains. This is a well written book and very informative as well.Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Additionally, this book reaches too far trying to explain too much through too little: love, sex, drug use, creativity, madness, political preference, progress, immigration, you name it - dopamine influences and even determines human behavior in almost any situation. I am not saying it does not play a role, I am saying the author is riding his hobby-horse to death. He found that a slower form of information, books, was the antidote to his information overload. So he made them part of his routine again. According to McGuire, "Reading books again has given me more time to reflect, to think, and has increased both my focus and the creative mental space to solve work problems." It strikes a perfect balance between technical precision, flowing relatable prose, effective functional metaphors and harder science.

For those of you that are begging for more specificity, we can give you a tool. One would be you can flip a coin before engaging in any of these types of activities and decide whether or not you are going to allow other dopamine-supportive elements to go, for instance, into the gym with you. Are you going to listen to music or not? If you enjoy listening to music, well then flip a coin, and if it comes up heads, bring the music in. If it comes up tails, don't. Okay? Sounds like you are undercutting your own progress, but actually you are serving your own progress both short term and long term by doing that. Now, the smartphone is a very interesting tool for dopamine, in light of all this. It's extremely common nowadays to see people texting and doing selfies, and communicating in various ways, listening to podcasts, listening to music, doing all sorts of things while they engage in other activities, or going to dinner and texting other people, or making plans, sharing information. I was in college when this whole MPTP thing happened, and I remember hearing this story. At the time, I had no understanding of what it is to have very high levels of dopamine or extremely depleted levels of dopamine. There was no reason why I should have that understanding. I mean, of course, I had experienced different pleasures of different kinds, and I've had lows in my life, but nothing to the extreme that I'm about to discuss. There's the danger of a cut to your skin that could lead to infection. There's the danger of storms, there's the danger of cold. There's the danger of leaving your loved ones behind. So you go out and forage, right? You could be hunting, you could be gathering, or you could be doing both. The going out and foraging process was, we are certain, driven by dopamine. I mean there's no fossil record of the brain, but these circuits have existed, we know, for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and they are present in every animal, not just mammals, but even in little worms like C. elegans. The same process, it's mediated by dopamine. So dopamine drives you to go out and look for things, and then let's say you find a couple berries. These ones are rotten, these ones are good. Maybe you hunt an animal and kill it, or you find an animal that was recently killed and you decide to take the meat; you are going to achieve or I should say experience some sort of dopamine release. Just very briefly, because it was also covered in the interview episode I did with Anna Lembke about addiction. Some of you might be asking, "What should I do if I experience a drop in my baseline level of dopamine because of engagement with some activity, or some substance, that led to big peaks?" Just to put some color, an example on this: a few episodes ago, I talked about a friend who I've known a long time, she's actually the child of a friend who has basically become addicted to video games. He decided, actually after seeing that episode with Anna, to do a 30-day complete fast from phone, from video games and from social media of all kinds. He's now at day 29, he's really accomplished this. Not incidentally, his levels of concentration, his overall mood are up. He's doing far, far better. What he did is hard; in particular, the first 14 days is really hard, but the way that you replenish the releasable pool of dopamine is to not engage in these dopaminergic-seeking behaviors. Well, dopamine is unique among chemicals in the brain because dopamine, unlike a lot of chemicals in the brain, works through what are called G-protein-coupled receptors. And for those of you that are about to pass out from the amount of detail, just hang in there with me, it's really not complicated. There are two ways that neurons can communicate, or mainly two ways. There are a third and a fourth, but mostly neurons communicate by two modes. One is what we call fast electrical synapses, ionotropic conduction, all right? You don't need to know what that means, but basically one neuron activates another neuron and little holes open up in that neuron and ions rush in.

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While the reward pathways ( Figure 1) are distinct in their anatomical organization, all three become active when anticipating or experiencing rewarding events. In particular, they reinforce the association between a particular stimulus or sequence of behaviors and the feel-good reward that follows. Every time a response to a stimulus results in a reward, these associations become stronger through a process called long-term potentiation. This process strengthens frequently used connections between brain cells called neurons by increasing the intensity at which they respond to particular stimuli. Lembke is sanguine that we can beat our digital dependencies by embracing a more monastic mindset. She advocates replacing some pleasure-seeking vices with“painful” pursuits. When we do things that are challenging – going for a run, having an ice bath, talking to a stranger, reading a book on philosophy – instead of receiving a dopamine boost beforehand we experience it afterwards. “Doing things that are hard is one of the best ways to pursue a life worth living, because the pleasure we get afterwards is more enduring,” she says.We tend to forget that earned highs are that much sweeter. Again, how much dopamine you experience from something depends on your baseline level of dopamine when you arrive there and your previous dopamine peaks. That's super important to understand, and it's completely neglected by the general language of dopamine hits. This is why when you repeatedly engage in something that you enjoy, your threshold for enjoyment goes up and up and up. So I want to talk about that process, and I want to explain how that process works because if you understand that process and you understand some of these schedules and kinetics, as we call them, around dopamine, you'll be in a terrific position to use any dopamine-enhancing tools that you decide to use. You'll be in an excellent position to modulate and control your own dopamine release for optimal motivation and drive.

So for instance, the pen that I'm holding right now is one of these Pilot V5s. I love these Pilot V5s. They don't sponsor the podcast. I just happen to like them. I like the way that they write, how they feel. If I spent enough time thinking about it or talking about it, I could probably get a dopamine increase just talking about this Pilot V5, and that's not because I have the propensity to release dopamine easily. It's that as we start to engage with something more and more, and what we say about it and what we encourage ourself to think about it has a profound impact on its rewarding or nonrewarding properties. Now, it's not simply the case that you can lie to yourself and you can tell yourself, I love something, and when you don't really love it, and it will increase dopamine. But what's been found over and over again is that if people journal about something, or they practice some form of appreciation for something, or they think of some aspect of something that they enjoy, the amount of dopamine that that behavior will evoke tends to go up. I ask myself in such contexts what influence meditation, mindfulness, and positive psychology might have on the neurochemistry of the brain and, in this case, especially on the essential little helpers that make our emotional spectrum so manifold, wonderful, irresponsible, and prone to lunacy.Many of these ideas are familiar: we’ve all heard about digital detoxes and mindfulness practices, but unlike many spiritual gurus, Lembke is straight-shooting. She is not promising sunshine and rainbows. Yes, it’s natural and healthy to pursue enjoyment, but our consumer culture has created an expectation “that life is supposed to be so fun!” she says. “And really, it’s not. Life is a slog and I think if we could admit that and take comfort in knowing we’re not alone in the day-to-day struggle, paradoxically, we would be happier.” We’re losing our capacity to delay gratification, solve problems