Most Replayed Moment: The Role of Dopamine in Addiction and Motivation - Anna Lembke

Steven Bartlett (0:03)

Marvel Studios The Fantastic Four. The biggest event of the summer.

Anna Lembke (0:12)

Has arrived. What is that?

Steven Bartlett (0:15)

Hold on! We will fight this together as a family.

Anna Lembke (0:18)

Johnny, now!

Steven Bartlett (0:21)

Marvel Studios The Fantastic Four First Steps. And now playing Only in Theaters. Rated PG-13. Some material may not be suitable for children under 13

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?

Anna Lembke (0:49)

Ah, good question. 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 really almost the survival chemical.

Steven Bartlett (1:09)

So what is dopamine? If you had to explain it to a 10-year-old, how would you go about explaining it?

Anna Lembke (1:14)

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. 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.

Steven Bartlett (2:13)

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.

Anna Lembke (2:24)

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.

Steven Bartlett (2:36)

And having an understanding of dopamine, how might that improve my life?

Anna Lembke (2:42)

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 behaviors that we've all become vulnerable to the problem of addiction.

Steven Bartlett (3:10)

What are the biggest misconceptions on the subject of dopamine? Because it's thrown around in society. I see it in my group chats, people saying, I need more dopamine or whatever, or that person just craves dopamine. What are the biggest misconceptions you've come across?

Anna Lembke (3:24)

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. Also, it's related to what we predicted about how rewarding or pleasurable something would be.

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 between pleasure and pain.

Steven Bartlett (4:10)

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?

Anna Lembke (4:27)

Yes, that's what I'm describing, yes.

Steven Bartlett (4:29)

Okay, and what activities that I do every day have an impact on my dopamine?

Anna Lembke (4:36)

Well, probably almost everything 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.