Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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want to know whether you're more like a dopaminergic type or Here&Now type (and if you don't understand these terms, read the book :D) Some of the best (engaging + entertaining + educational + enlightening) science writing I have experienced in quite some time. Dopamine is a chemical produced by our brains that plays a starring role in motivating behavior. It gets released when we take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after we exercise, and, importantly, when we have successful social interactions. In an evolutionary context, it rewards us for beneficial behaviors and motivates us to repeat them. 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.

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.

The Levers in Our Brains – Dopamine and social reward

It strikes a perfect balance between technical precision, flowing relatable prose, effective functional metaphors and harder science. So for anyone that's experienced a real drop in baseline, who has addictive tendencies, whether or not they're behaviors or substances, that is always going to be the path forward is going to be either cold turkey or through some sort of tapering to limit interactions with what would otherwise be the dopamine-evoking behavior or substance. So let's talk about the optimal way to engage in activities, or to consume things, that evoke dopamine. And by no means am I encouraging people to take drugs of abuse. I would not do that, I am not doing that, but some of the things on these lists of dopamine-evoking activities are things like chocolate, coffee — even if it's indirect; sex and reproduction, provided it's healthy, consensual, context-appropriate, age-appropriate, species-appropriate, of course, is central to our evolution and progression as a species. Why are we always hopeful for solutions even in the darkest times--and so good at figuring them out?

So let's talk about dopamine. Most people have heard of dopamine, and we hear all the time now about dopamine hits, but actually there's no such thing as a dopamine hit. And actually, the way that your body uses dopamine is to have a baseline level of dopamine, meaning an amount of dopamine that's circulating in your brain and body all the time. And that turns out to be important for how you feel generally, whether or not you're in a good mood, motivated, et cetera. And you also can experience peaks in dopamine above baseline. Now, this has a very specific name in the neurobiology literature, so-called "tonic" and "phasic" release of dopamine. And I'll explain what that means in a couple of minutes. But if you remember nothing else from this episode, please remember this. That when you experience something or you crave something really desirable, really exciting to you, very pleasurable, what happens afterwards is your baseline level of dopamine drops. So these peaks in dopamine, they influence how much dopamine will generally be circulating afterward. Ironically the dopamine circuits in the brains of humans have been responsible for the staggering heights of accomplishment and achievement but will also (paradoxically) bring about the demise of said humans. When we binge on pleasurable things, homeostasis means “our brain compensates by bringing us lower and lower and lower,” says Lembke. Each time the thing becomes less enjoyable, but we eventually become dependent on those stimuli to keep functioning. We spiral into a joy-seeking abyss. The digital world enables bingeing on a previously unseen scale because there are no practical limitations forcing us to pause. With substances, you eventually run out of money or lines of cocaine (even temporarily), but Netflix shows or TikTok feeds are indefatigable. Often you needn’t do anything: the next hit automatically loads on your screen. Nicotine, in particular nicotine that is smoked, like cigarettes, and so forth, increases dopamine two and a half times above baseline. So there's a peak that goes up above baseline two and a half times higher. It is very short-lived. Anyone who's ever been a chain smoker or observed a chain smoker understands that the increase in dopamine from nicotine is very short-lived. Cocaine will increase the level of dopamine in the bloodstream two and a half times above baseline, and amphetamine, another drug that increases dopamine, will increase the amount of dopamine in the bloodstream 10 times above baseline, a tremendous increase in dopamine. Exercise, now exercise will have a different impact on the levels of dopamine depending on how much somebody subjectively enjoys that exercise. So if you're somebody who loves running, chances are it's going to increase your levels of dopamine two times above your baseline, not unlike sex. Just when you thought you knew all you needed to know about the addiction crisis, along comes Dr. Anna Lembke with her second brilliant book on the topic—this one not about a drug but about the most powerful chemical of all: the dopamine that rules the pain and pleasure centers of our minds. In an era of overconsumption and instant gratification, Dopamine Nation explains the personal and societal price of being ruled by the next fix—and how to manage it. No matter what you might find yourself over-indulging in—from the internet to food to work to sex—you’ll find this book riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued. Lembke weaves patient stories with research, in a voice that’s as empathetic as it is clear-eyed.”There are a lot of myths about the molecule dopamine; we often hear about so-called dopamine hits. Today we are going to dispel many common myths about dopamine, and we are going to talk about how dopamine actually works. We're going to discuss the biology of dopamine, the psychology. We will discuss some neural circuits and a really exciting aspect of dopamine biology or so-called dopamine schedules. In other words, we are going to discuss how things like food, drugs, caffeine, pornography, even some plant-based compounds, can change our baseline levels of dopamine. And in doing so, they change how much dopamine we are capable of experiencing from what could be very satisfying events, or events that make us feel not so good because of things that we did or took prior. So I promise you it's going to be a vast discussion, but I will structure it for you, and you'll come away with a deep understanding of really what drives you. You will also come away with a lot of tools, how to leverage dopamine so that you can sustain energy, drive and motivation for the things that are important to you over long periods of time. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are going to talk all about dopamine and what drives you to do the things that you do. We're going to talk about motivation and desire and craving, but also how dopamine relates to satisfaction and our feelings of well-being. And of course, any discussion about dopamine has to include a discussion about the potential for dopamine-induced addiction. Indeed, dopamine lies at the heart of addiction to all things, but today we are mainly going to focus on how what we do and how we do it, and how we conceptualize those things, leads to changes in this amazing molecule in our brain and bodies that we call dopamine. I'm going to teach you what dopamine is and what it is not.

Now, that's a lot of language, but basically what we call this is the mesocorticolimbic pathway. This is the pathway by which dopamine influences motivation, drive and craving. It involves structures that some of you may have heard of before, things like nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex. This is the pathway that really gets disrupted in addictions, where in particular drugs that influence the release of dopamine, like cocaine and methamphetamine, we'll talk about those drugs today. They tap into this pathway. But if you are pursuing a partner, a boyfriend or girlfriend, if you're pursuing a degree in school, if you're pursuing a finish line in a race, you are tapping into this so-called mesocorticolimbic pathway. This is the classic reward pathway in all mammals.

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Dopamine can do that like any other neurotransmitter or neuromodulator. So it can have one neuron influence another neuron, but dopamine can also engage in what's called volumetric release. Volumetric release is like a giant vomit that gets out to 50 or a hundred or even thousands of cells. So there's local release, what we call synaptic release, and then there's volumetric release. So volumetric release is like dumping all this dopamine out into the system. So dopamine is incredible because it can change the way that our neural circuits work at a local scale and at a very broad scale. 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.