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

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• 00:03

  You wrote one of the most iconic, well-known books about dopamine,

• 00:08

  which propelled the subject matter of dopamine into the public consciousness.

• 00:12

  But I guess the most important question I should ask you is... why does dopamine matter?

• 00:19

  Ah, good question.

• 00:20

  Good place to start.

• 00:23

  I mean, dopamine matters because it's fundamental to our survival.

• 00:27

  So it's the chemical that we make in our brain that tells us this is something we should approach,

• 00:34

  explore, investigate.

• 00:36

  So it's really almost the survival chemical.

• 00:39

  So what is dopamine?

• 00:40

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

• 00:44

  So dopamine is a chemical that we make in our brain.

• 00:49

  It has... many different functions,

• 00:52

  but one of its most important functions is that it helps us experience pleasure,

• 00:58

  reward, and motivation.

• 01:01

  It may be even more important for the motivation to do things than it is for the pleasure itself.

• 01:07

  So for example,

• 01:08

  there's a very famous experiment in which rats were engineered to have no dopamine in the brain's reward pathway.

• 01:16

  And the scientists discovered that if they put food in the rat's mouth, the rat would eat the food,

• 01:21

  would seem to get some pleasure from the food,

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