Dopamine Nation

Hello and welcome everyone. This is ActInFLAB guest stream number 22.1. I'm here with Dr. Anna Lemke and we are here to discuss dopamine and beyond and really looking forward to this conversation and appreciate the time. So to you for any introductory context and then really looking forward to this discussion. Yeah, well thank you so much for having me, Daniel. You know, I've been, you know, interested in you and your work for many years now and so I'm really excited to have an excuse to reconnect and just excited to be here. And you asked me to start by introducing myself. So I'm a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and also addiction medicine. At Stanford University School of Medicine. I'm also author of the book Dopamine Nation, Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. And that's what we're going to talk about, which I, and Daniel's quoted in there. And I would have actually included Daniel more in there if I had, if I were smart enough to actually understand the work that he does. Thanks. We'll get there with the ants and the dopamine, but maybe just what is Dopamine Nation about and what motivated you to write it? So Dopamine Nation is kind of a blend of neuroscience made simple, combined with practical advice for how to live in a dopamine overloaded world, holding up people in recovery from severe addictions as modern day profits for the rest of us, because all the neuroscience in the world, as valuable as it is, can't make up for the whole experience of people who have gotten into recovery from addiction. Dopamine Nation also posits a kind of global hypothesis, you know, tentatively posits the hypothesis that the growing rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and other mental health disorders across the world are caused at least in part by the problem of overabundance, and the kind of lack of appropriate friction in our lives. In other words, the ways in which our lives are maybe too easy, and the way that our primitive wiring is mismatched for this modern ecosystem of overwhelming overabundance. Okay. One dopamine question, and then I think we'll start to see some areas of overlap with active inference. What could you say to the role of dopamine in reward and motivation signaling, like in wanting and liking, and how does dopamine play a role in behavioral selection? Okay, so dopamine is essential for the experience of motivation, reward, and pleasure. It may be even more important for motivation than it is for the experience of pleasure, and I base this on the work of my amazing neuroscience colleagues, who have done experiments, for example, where they engineer a rat's brain to be depleted of dopamine receptors and discover that if they give that rat food, it will eat the food and seem to take pleasure in the food. But if they put the food, you know, some distance away, the rat will starve to death, meaning that the absence of dopamine in these key reward circuits, make it such that that animal is no longer motivated to do the work that it takes to get their reward. And my neuroscience colleagues like Rob Malenka have said that for him, the definition of addiction is how hard an animal is willing to work to get their reward. And that has direct application to the clinical work that I do. You know, we all like what we like. And once we experience the thing that we like, of course, we want to repeat it. But the kind of fundamental difference between those who go on to develop addiction and those who don't is that those who develop addiction are willing to work very, very hard to get their drug of choice and are willing to give up a lot of other things, even when that pursuit causes enormous amount of, you know, personal cost. Thank you for that. That's really powerful with Professor Malenka's definition of how hard they work to get it because it's like an action oriented definition that could be measured in or proxied by different things, especially clinically, as opposed to like an inference or a purely…