i think one of the most important findings in the last few years in neuroscience is that
while the molecule dopamine is associated with reward it's more about motivation and craving
there's a really classic experiment now that people use to demonstrate this take two rats
and the rats independently separate cages can lever press for food or when they can access food
there's a little bit of dopamine that's released anytime they get some food so we always thought
that food like many other rewards like food sex warmth when you're cold cool when you're too warm
is triggering the release of dopamine but someone had the good idea to deplete dopamine in one of
those animals and then what you find is that the animal without dopamine still enjoys food still
enjoys other pleasures so dopamine is not really involved in the enjoyment of those pleasures
it's involved in motivation because if you make the animal have to move just one rat's length
believe it or not to get to that lever the animal with dopamine will work to go get that thing it
will work through some effort to go get the reward whereas the animal or turns out the human without
much dopamine can still experience pleasure they can sit on their couch and cram their face with
pleasure inducing calories or what have you watch pleasure inducing things on the
television but they have very little motivation to go pursue things that will deliver them pleasure
it's actually what's really driven the forward evolution of our our species has been the desire
to go seek things beyond the confines of our skin and when i say the common currency is
dopamine what i mean is the molecule dopamine when secreted in the brain makes us pursue
things build things create things makes us want new things that we don't currently already have
and so it has a lot of dimensions to it but rather than think about dopamine as a signal for reward
like a dopamine hit we classically think to talk about it it's more accurate really to think about
dopamine as driving motivation and craving to go seek rewards that's the rad experiment and
it's a way of tabulating where we are in our life are we doing well or are we doing poorly and that
happens on very short time scales like you wake up feeling good or do you wake up feeling kind of low
or on long time scales if you're halfway through a long degree or you're halfway through your life
how are you doing how do you gauge that well it has everything to do with how much dopamine you
were releasing in the previous days and weeks and years so you're always comparing and all of this
is subconscious but what's cool is that once you make these processes conscious once you understand
a little bit about how dopamine is released and how it changes our perspective and our behavior
then you can actually work with it and so we go back to this example the person that's
not motivated that can't get off the couch that doesn't want to do anything well this
is the problem they are effectively the rat with no dopamine but they can still achieve
some sense of pleasure by consuming excess calories by consuming social media and look i'm
not judging i do this stuff too right scrolling social media if you've ever scrolled social media
and you're like i don't even know why i'm doing this it doesn't really feel that good
and i can remember a time where you'd see something it was just so cool or you
see something online i remember this when ted talks first came out i was like this is amazing
these are some at least some of them are really smart people sharing really cool insights
and then now that they're like a gazillion ted talks i remember spending a winter in my office at
when i was a junior professor cleaning my office finally and binging ted talks in the background
thinking this is a good use of my time pretty soon they all sucked to me i was like this isn't good
so what you need to do is stop watching dead docs for a while wait and then they become interesting
again and that's this pain pleasure balance and so for people that aren't feeling motivated the
problem is they're not motivated but they're getting just enough or excess sustenance so
they're getting the little mild hits of opioid it becomes an opioid system and if you think
about the opioid drugs as opposed to dopamine dopaminergic drugs dopaminergic drugs make people
rabid for everything you know drugs of abuse like cocaine amphetamine make people incredibly
outward directed or they hardly notice anything except what they want more of one more more it's
very it's bad because those drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the reward it's
very circular the only the drug can give that much dopamine nothing they could pursue would
give them as much dopamine as the drug itself so there's that and then there's the kind of opioid
like effects of constantly indulging oneself with social media or with video games or with
with food or with anything to the point where it no longer evokes the motivation and craving
and this is really the new evolution of the understanding of dopamine in neuro in neuroscience
which is that dopamine itself is not the reward it's the build up to the reward and the reward has
more of a kind of opioid bliss-like property which itself is not bad if it's endogenous released from
within but when we can just sit there like the like the rat with no dopamine gorging
ourselves with pleasures so to speak what you end up with is somebody that feels really unmotivated
and those pleasures no longer work to tickle those feel good circuits and so there's no
reason for them to go out and pursue anything the problem is not pleasures the problem is that
pleasure experienced without prior requirement for pursuit is terrible for us it's terrible
for us as individuals it's terrible for us as as groups and i have great confidence in the human
species to work this out but we are finding now and we are going to increasingly find
that those who will be successful young or old are going to be those people who can create their
own internal buffers they're going to be able to control their relationship to pleasures because
the proximity to pleasures and the availability is the problem if you look at the increase in
use of drugs of abuse or prescription medication which at least at the first past deliver pleasure
pain relief the whole issue with the opioid crisis and dopaminergic drugs like ritalin adderall you
know there is sometimes there's a clinical need but tons of people are taking those recreationally
now or to study huge dopamine increases are what those cause that is a problem that's a serious
problem because it creates a cycle where you you need more of that specific thing i always say
addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure god that's
such a good difference and you know and i don't like to comment too much on enlightenment because
you know i don't really know what that is as a neurobiologist but a good life we could say is
a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure and even better is a good life is a
progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure and includes pleasure through motivation
and hard work and understanding this pain pleasure balance whereby if you experience pain and you can
continue to be in that friction and exert effort the rewards are that much greater when they arrive
and so i think that if you look at any drug of abuse or any situation where somebody
isn't motivated or thinks that now they may have clinically diagnosed attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder but a lot of what people think is adhd it turns out is people just over
consuming dopamine from various sources and then and also the context within a tick-tock feed is
the context switch is insane the brain has never seen first of all there's the first time in human
evolution that we wrote with our thumbs but that's a pretty benign shift and that the other shift is
normally you walk from one room to another or from a field into the trees or from a hut into or a
house or whatever it is but now you can get 10 000 context switches in that 30 minutes of scrolling
on instagram or to talk and so it's all about self-regulation we are going to select for the
people that can self-regulate and so then people say well how do you self-regulate how do kids
self-regulate well this is my hope and one of the reasons i've gotten excited about public education
and teaching neuroscience is that this is a place where knowledge of knowledge actually can allow
oneself to intervene when you think i'm feeling low i don't feel good nothing really feels like
am i depressed maybe but maybe you're just you've saturated the dopamine circuits you're now in the
pain part of things what do you do well you have to stop you need you need to replenish dopamine
you need to stop engaging with this behavior and then your pleasure for it will come back
but you have to constantly control the hinge it's not just about being back and forth on the seesaw
you have to make sure the hinge doesn't get stuck in pain or in pleasure understanding that pain
and pleasure in this really dynamic balance can also help us which in the following way
any pain that you feel the longer day the less sleep the the kind of agony that things aren't
working that power outlet doesn't work or the internet is slow whatever it is
the amount of pleasure that you will eventually experience is directly relation related excuse me
to how much pain you experience so we know this from actually what nowadays would be considered
quite barbaric and unethical experiments where they would give people electrical shocks
and they would measure their response and then they'd say we're going to increase it we're
going to increase it eventually they get to the point where a slight uh shock that was previously
very painful actually evokes a sense of pleasure now you couldn't do these experiments anymore
these are not the experiments i do in my lab and these are older experiments but for instance i
and this has been discussed in scientific research papers uh giving somebody a like a ten minute ice
bath for instance or even a three-minute ice bath or a one-minute ice bath it's quite painful but
there was a study from the university of prague uh european journal physiology showed that
after a painful ice bath stimulus the amount of dopamine release goes up for two and a half hours
to 250 percent above baseline and that's not because the ice bath itself evokes dopamine
release a lot of people think oh cold water of ox dopamine release no pain evokes dopamine release
after the pain is over just understanding the more friction and pain that you experience the greater
the dopamine reward you will get later and that serves as its own amplifier of the whole process
of pursuing more dopamine so the the keys are to pursue rewards but understand that the pursuit
is actually the reward if you want to have repeated wins then what you realize is your
capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator not just seeking dopamine rewards that is infinite
you