Selects: How Dopamine Works

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Selects: How Dopamine Works"

Podcast: Stuff You Should Know
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Date: February 28, 2026
Episode Theme: Exploring the real science of dopamine—what it is, what it does, and how both scientists and pop culture frequently get it wrong.

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Overview

In this classic "Selects" episode, Josh and Chuck dig deep into dopamine, the much-hyped brain chemical. They dismantle common misconceptions about dopamine as a "pleasure molecule" and explain its critical role in motivation, learning, movement, addiction, risk-taking, and even social media use. The episode covers the history of dopamine research, the different dopaminergic pathways, and discusses how our evolving understanding of dopamine changes the way we think about addiction, pleasure, and modern life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dopamine: The Misunderstood Neurotransmitter

• Debunking the Pleasure Myth ([03:33]):
  • Dopamine is widely mischaracterized in popular media and even reputable medical sites as the ultimate "pleasure chemical."
  • Josh Clark: "Basically everything we know in popular culture... you'll see this old antiquated, outdated view of what dopamine is being kind of paraded around. The idea that it's a... pleasure inducing chemical... is just absolutely not true."
• Dopamine is a neurotransmitter—a chemical messenger in the brain—with far more roles than just pleasure.

2. How Dopamine Works: Production & Function

• Synthesis & Presence in Humans ([06:21]–[07:35]):
  • Dopamine can't cross the blood-brain barrier; its precursor, tyrosine (an amino acid), can and is converted in the brain.
  • Not exclusive to humans, but humans produce about three times more dopamine than other primates, possibly key to our species' success.
  • Chuck Bryant: "Humans love this stuff and we produce about three times as much as other primates do."
  • Josh Clark: "Dopamine is what made humans so successful... It could all just come down to dopamine, essentially."
• Neurotransmitter Basics ([09:22]–[10:06]):
  • Dopamine enables signals to pass from neuron to neuron, with different effects depending on the receptors and pathways involved.

3. Pathways of Dopamine in the Brain ([10:49]–[12:46])

• Four Main Pathways:
  1. Nigrostriatal: Motor control; dysfunction leads to Parkinson’s.
  2. Mesocortical: Executive function, prioritization, planning.
  3. Tuberoinfundibular: Blocks milk production in mammals; relevant for breastfeeding.
  4. Mesolimbic: Reward, emotion, addiction—this is the "headline" pathway.
• Memorable moment ([13:15]):
  • Josh Clark: "This is the reason why some people get the chemical drawing of the molecular drawing of dopamine, like, tattooed on their wrists... because of that pathway."

4. Dopamine's Actual Role in Pleasure & Motivation

• Not Just for Pleasure ([20:06]–[24:52]):
  • Historical rodent studies were misunderstood: removing dopamine didn’t remove pleasure ("liking"), but the motivation ("wanting") to seek reward.
  • Josh Clark ([24:52]): "It was a lack of motivation to seek out that pleasure. That's the effect of not having enough dopamine..."
• Theories:
  • Prediction Error—dopamine measures the gap between expected and actual reward ([25:14]):
    • "If you expected to like that peanut butter pie and it’s even better, dopamine reinforces that."
  • Motivational Signal—dopamine drives actions taken to get rewards ([26:17]).
• “Awakenings” Example ([26:35]–[28:27]):
  • Illustrates dopamine's role in movement and motivation, not pleasure.
  • Josh Clark: "Given the right stimulus, even... as just a crazy amount of Parkinson's symptoms can be overcome... by that dopamine hit."

5. Dopamine, Learning, and Making Connections ([28:59]):

• Dopamine may be fundamentally what enables learning by connecting experiences and creating mental maps of the world.
  • Josh Clark: "At base, what dopamine is doing is allowing us to form connections. Imagine the world if we didn't connect one thing to another..."

6. Addiction and Dopamine ([29:55]–[35:36]):

• Complex Role in Addiction:
  • Dopamine connects drug use to the feeling of pleasure, but addiction is multi-faceted (genetics, environment, drug access).
  • Flooding the brain with dopamine (as in Parkinson’s treatment) can lead to compulsive behaviors (e.g., gambling).
  • Chronic drug use reduces available dopamine receptors, increasing compulsion and diminishing natural pleasure (anhedonia).
  • Loss of dopamine impacts impulse control, leading to increased risk-taking and possibly reckless behavior.

7. Risk-Taking, ADHD, and Dopamine ([36:01]–[39:14]):

• Fewer dopamine autoreceptors may predispose individuals to risk-taking.
• Dopamine is tied to reward-driven risk, not to risks with a possible loss.
• ADHD: Dopamine deficiency may be involved, but the mechanism is not definitively established; impulsive behaviors could be due to lack of dopamine-mediated impulse control, not a "dopamine-seeking" drive.

8. Dopamine and Social Media ([42:44]–[47:50]):

• Social media apps are engineered to trigger dopamine-driven feedback loops with notifications, likes, and random rewards.
  • Josh Clark ([44:03]): "That strategy was based on short term dopamine driven feedback loops."
  • Chuck Bryant ([44:03]): "It was a core foundation... was the really the quote that kind of stuck out with how people behave using our platform."
• Randomness increases the dopamine effect, maximizing addictive potential.
• "Dopamine fasts": An attempt to walk back from compulsive behaviors, but based on misunderstood science. Denial of pleasurable stimuli won’t "recharge" dopamine.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Dopamine’s Reputation
  • Josh Clark: "[Dopamine] is probably the most misunderstood neurochemical..." ([03:33])
• On Human Success vs. Animals
  • Josh Clark: "It could all just come down to dopamine, essentially." ([07:35])
• On Pleasure vs. Motivation
  • Josh Clark: "A lack of dopamine didn't lead to a lack of pleasure... It was a lack of motivation to seek out that pleasure." ([24:52])
• Social Media Admission
  • Chuck Bryant ([44:03]): "It was a part of the core strategy to get people to come back again and again and again."
• Dopamine Fast Critique
  • Josh Clark ([47:50]): "Dopamine does not work like that. If you stop flooding your brain with dopamine, it doesn't replenish. It doesn't need to replenish."
• On Science’s Limits
  • Josh Clark ([50:06]): "That's dopamine as we understand it in 2024, everybody."
  • Josh Clark ([50:10]): "If you run across somebody who refers to dopamine as a pleasure chemical... just turn around and walk away and go find somebody else."

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Important Timestamps

• Introduction to Dopamine and Myths: [03:33]
• Dopamine Synthesis and Human Evolution: [06:21]–[07:35]
• Dopaminergic Pathways: [10:49]–[12:46]
• Pleasure vs. Motivation: [20:06]–[24:52]
• Prediction Error Theory: [25:14]
• "Awakenings" and Motivation: [26:35]–[28:27]
• Addiction and Dopamine: [29:55]–[35:36]
• Risk-taking and ADHD: [36:01]–[39:14]
• Social Media & Dopamine Loops: [42:44]–[47:50]
• Dopamine Fasting and Misconceptions: [47:50]–[49:49]
• Wrap-up and Current Understanding: [50:06]

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Tone & Language

Josh and Chuck maintain their signature conversational, witty, and accessible style—bringing in humor, relatable metaphors (peanut butter pie!), and cultural references while breaking down complex neuroscience for a wide audience. Their tone remains skeptical and curious, pushing back against pop-science simplifications.

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Conclusion

This episode gives listeners a much more nuanced understanding of dopamine, highlighting its role in motivation, movement, learning, and behavior—as well as its over-hyped and misunderstood association with pleasure and addiction. Listeners come away better equipped to critically evaluate claims about "dopamine hits," whether in media, wellness trends, or social platforms alike.

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For more episodes and resources, visit the Stuff You Should Know podcast page.

Transcript

[Podcast Announcer]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Chuck Bryant]

Guaranteed Human.

[Podcast Announcer]

Hello.

[Rob Gronkowski]

Malcolm Glaubel here.

[Josh Clark]

We're here in New York City with T Mobile for business recording another episode of Revisionist history about how 5G network slicing strengthens trust and connections across worldwide industries.

[Chuck Bryant]

Slicing can be used for so many different things.

[Rob Gronkowski]

We're here with our friends from CNN from Siemens Energy.

[Josh Clark]

The ways that it can be used,

[Rob Gronkowski]

frankly, are limitless and are really, really built to think through.

[Chuck Bryant]

How can T Mobile understand the pain points that our customers have?

[Rob Gronkowski]

Smash those pain points and help you deliver very specific outcomes?

[Josh Clark]

This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is Bowen Yang from Los Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Hey, so what if you could boost the WI fi to one of your devices when you need it most? Because Xfinity WI fi can. And. And what if your WI fi could fix itself before there's even really a problem? Xfinity is so reliable. It does that, too. What if your wifi had parental instincts? Xfinity WI Fi is part nanny, part ninja, protecting your kids while they're online. And finally, what if your wifi was, like, the smartest WI fi? Yeah, it's WI fi that is so smart, it makes everything work better together. Bottom line, Xfinity is smart and reliable. You deserve the peace of mind of having WI fi. That's good. Got your back, Xfinity. Imagine that.

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[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, everybody. Happy Saturday. Chuck here with a curated Selects episode in which we bring out a classic from. Dust it off from the old dustbin so you can give it a listen. This one is called How Dopamine Works, and it's one of, obviously, one of our more sciencey episodes. And I managed to struggle to get through it because, you know, I'm not good at these. But it was a great episode, so I hope you like it.

[Josh Clark]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartradio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, with three amigos, back together again after some massively triumphant live shows.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, we did our little north east spring swing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it was great. It was a good show.

[Josh Clark]

Which one?

[Chuck Bryant]

The. The podcast topic that we did. That we did live.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I gotcha.

[Chuck Bryant]

That we're doing all year.

[Josh Clark]

I gotcha. It was pretty good. I love that. That topic.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's what you call an on sequitur.

[Josh Clark]

But it does feel good to be back, doesn't it? Back in the studio, back doing what we're born to do.

[Chuck Bryant]

I kind of prefer on stage, but sure. This is great too.

[Josh Clark]

Do you. You like the thrill of the audience, the roar of the crowd, that bowl running at you?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Nice. I like it too, sometimes when I'm not totally terrified because I drank too much energy drinks.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I wonder if your dopamine receptors are functioning as they should.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's a great question, Chuck. And that's a wonderful segue too, because it just so happens that today the topic of this episode is dopamine. And there's probably no more misunderstood neurochemical, certainly neurochemical, maybe substance in your body at all than dopamine. We used to think we had a really great handle on dopamine and what it does and how it works. And it turns out that we are. At every turn a new study comes along that says, nope, we're wrong. Yep, we're wrong about that. Well, what about. Yep, wrong about that? Basically everything we know in popular culture. And I mean, if you even gone to like Cleveland Clinic website or WebMD website or Harvard Health has some articles, you'll see this old antiquated, outdated view of what dopamine is being kind of paraded around. The idea that it's a. A pleasure inducing chemical, that if something gives you pleasure, you're. You're responding to a hit of dopamine. And that is just absolutely not true.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And this may be the most oft covered stuff you should know thing that hasn't gotten its own title yet.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, man. Dopamine is the reigning champ right now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, we talk about this stuff all the time. It seems like.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, we do, because it comes up a lot. And the reason why is because it turns out it has a lot to do with more than just pleasure, like everybody. Yes, it is associated with pleasure, just not the way we've thought for very long. And it does a lot of other stuff too. Essentially what it does is it signals things. It says, hey, you. You behave or you act up, you stop behaving Something like that. I'm not quite sure exactly what it says. I don't speak dopamine, but it's a neurotransmitter. So it's a chemical messenger in the brain at base, but it's associated with so many different things that of course, dopamine comes up all the time in our podcast.

[Chuck Bryant]

It sure does. So it is, like you said, a neurotransmitter, one of more than 100 of those bad boys functioning in our bodies. And like you said, it lets things communicate. It's a facilitator. But it gets all the press for its like the feel good stuff that you mentioned, addiction behaviors, whether it's gambling or drugs or. Or the thrill of those people that walk around on ledges and stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Ledge walkers.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, ledge walkers. But it does all kinds of things. That's just where it makes the newspaper headlines. But we should probably talk a little bit about just the neurotransmitter cycle that it goes through.

[Josh Clark]

Sure. So the whole thing starts. It turns out that dopamine is used throughout the body, but for the most part, it's used in the brain. The problem is, if you, like, had a big handful of dopamine and you just shoved it in your mouth, it couldn't make it into your brain for use. It can't cross the blood brain barrier, in other words. Fortunately, the thing that makes dopamine up, its essential ingredient, tyrosine, an amino acid, can cross the blood brain barrier. And when it gets there, it gets a big fat hug from something called tyrosine hydroxylase, and that converts it into dopamine. And all of a sudden your brain's like, yes, let's go.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. And we've known about it a long time. It's been around a long time. It is not exclusive to human beings.

[Josh Clark]

No, that's a big one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's in all kinds of animals. But we are really kind of great at making it, and I was about to say hooked on it, but that implies the whole addiction thing, and I don't want to go down that road, but humans love this stuff and we produce about three times as much as other primates do.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And in fact, Emily Deans wrote an article in 2011, I think, on Psychology Today. She's an evolutionary psychiatrist, and she said that dopamine is what made humans so successful. And from what I can tell, the latest research about dopamine is that it essentially is what allows us to learn about the world around us. We make connections that collectively form our mental map of the world, of how we're to behave around other people, of how we do things like go get food, like that. Dopamine is somehow behind all of it. And that because we're so responsive to dopamine and we produce so much dopamine compared to other animals in the animal kingdom, that is conceivably what has allowed us to become as successful as we are compared to other animals. Isn't that nuts? Like, it could all just come down to dopamine? Essentially, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Opposable thumbs, maybe, sure.

[Josh Clark]

But I mean, what are opposable thumbs if you can't get the wherewithal to move it.

[Chuck Bryant]

True, but if you had the wherewithal to move it and you couldn't grab something.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. You could probably be using the heels of both hands just like a thumb.

[Chuck Bryant]

Are you underselling the opposable thumb?

[Josh Clark]

Yes. I'm sick of the opposable thumb always hogging the spotlight. It's dopamine's time.

[Chuck Bryant]

You can get those removed, you know, See how you do.

[Josh Clark]

I guess I could. That sounds like a dare to me, Chuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

Say goodbye to your tennis game.

[Josh Clark]

I can play it just by holding the racket with both heels of my hand.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or I guess we should have said pickleball. That'd be more current, right?

[Josh Clark]

I don't play pickleball.

[Chuck Bryant]

I haven't tried it yet. I want to, though.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, well, there's plenty of places and people to play it with yet.

[Chuck Bryant]

I have found no one or no place.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I'm sure somebody will write in and offer to play with you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Of course, then I go out there and I, like, blow my ACL or something. Oh, God, that was nice. So at the highest level, you know, we kind of talked about this a thousand times before, but dopamine functions as a neurotransmitter. It enables signals to pass through these gaps, these synapses, and make connection from neuron to neuron. And that's just sort of the bird's eye view. But there are all kinds of things that dopamine does, and depending what kinds of neurons it's talking to and it's introducing to one another, it's gonna have different effects on the human body.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. So there's D1 to D5, I think, types of receptors, dopamine receptors, and four pathways that they follow. And like you said, depending on what receptor is being activated and what pathway is being followed, all sorts of different stuff can happen. Dopamine's associated with motor control, learning, memory malfunctions. In it can result in psychosis. They use dopamine as a vasostimulant to treat heart conditions. It has just a cluster of different effects on the body depending on where it's being processed, like what pathway it's being processed. Right. And I think I said there's four of them total.

[Chuck Bryant]

Did you want to talk about those?

[Josh Clark]

I feel like we should.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay. The first one is the nigrostriatal tract.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

You mentioned motor control first. And that's the tract that has to do with motor control.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So if those aren't working correctly, the one that dopamine neurons. Or the dopaminergic pathway in the nigrostriatal tract that can result in Parkinson's. It's very famously associated with dopamine. For anybody who has read Awakenings or saw the movie.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Which we'll probably talk about a little bit more later.

[Chuck Bryant]

That movie.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

I got a great, great bit up my sleeve. Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

The second pathway is the mesocortical pathway. That has a lot to do with executive functioning, prioritizing stuff, how your brain plans things, how it files away stuff, and how it organizes your overall sort of priorities.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And now it's time to talk about the most random dopaminergic pathway of all. The tuberoin fundibular pathway. Tuberoen. Fundibular.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think you had it right the first time.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, we'll edit out the second one. Then we'll put in a slide whistle over it. So that connects the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. And from what I can tell, I was like, well, what else does it do? The sole role of this pathway is to block the production of milk or to. Yes, to prevent the production of milk in the female breast of mammals. That's what it does. That's that pathway's role. And if you block that pathway, the milk production begins. Isn't that interesting?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, we talked about that in the two parter. The old breastfeeding two parter.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, we did.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I don't remember that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's where it all begins. No, I have a terrible memory. I know you're making fun of me. There's also the mesolimbic pathway. Uh, we've talked a lot about the limbic system in the episode. In many episodes. But reward and emotion. And this is the one where. This is the one that gets all the press because this is the one that has to deal with addiction, pleasure. And we're gonna talk a lot about reward and how reward factors into how dopamine works.

[Josh Clark]

Right. This is the reason why some people get the chemical drawing of the molecular drawing of dopamine, like, tattooed on their wrists because they're such so hedonic and into pleasure. That's why you might see somebody with that, because of that pathway.

[Chuck Bryant]

I never heard of that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's a thing. It unfortunately turns out to be a misinterpretation, but it is a thing that people do sometimes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure. So, you know, we talked about misunderstandings about dopamine, and up until not too long ago, we didn't know a lot about exactly how dopamine worked in the body. And there was a misguided thought that there was something called volume transmission at work, which was you just sort of. Well, you don't flood. We'll talk about artificially flooding dopamine, which is also a problem that resulted from this misnomer. But dopamine just went very slowly. It was not very specific at all, just kind of washed over the brain. And if it made some connections with various neurons, then that was kind of the dumb luck of dopamine, because dopamine is just dopey.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Here's a great example of just how wrong we got. Dopamine. It turns out the process that dopamine is excreted and crosses into the synapse and creates, like, an electrical transmission in the brain is the exact opposite of volume transmission. Yeah. It could not be more opposite than the idea that it just floods slowly across the brain and whatever it runs into, it runs into. We found that in milliseconds, a precise squirt of dopamine hits exactly the right neuron in exactly the right place. It's right on the money. That's how dopamine is excreted. The exact opposite of volume transmission.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And we learned that not Too long ago, 2018, medical researchers at Harvard released this paper and said, hey, guess what, everyone? It's the opposite of everything you've been saying. And everyone went, oh, okay. Sorry about that.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

My b.

[Josh Clark]

So after the dopamine is excreted and it does its job, it actually breaks down remarkably quickly. It turns into something. It's metabolized into something called Homo vanillic acid. Right. And from what I can tell, I don't know what the homo does to the vanillic acid, but vanillic acid is the flavor of vanilla. So from what I can tell, if you tasted the Homo vanillic acid, which is like the metabolite found in cerebrospinal fluid that we test to see how much dopamine you have in your brain at any given time. It may taste like vanilla.

[Podcast Announcer]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

Isn't that interesting?

[Chuck Bryant]

It's gross.

[Josh Clark]

It is gross. And I don't know also if we said that just 20,000 neurons are capable of synthesizing dopamine, but that's a really small proportion of the total number of neurons we have to about 100 billion, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Josh Clark]

You want to take a break?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, we'll break and we'll talk about, well, what everyone wants to hear about, which is how dopamine and pleasure hold hands with one another.

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[Josh Clark]

So check this whole, I should say, misunderstanding of dopamine as the ultimate pleasure chemical. If you take a drag off a cigarette, if you snort a line of coke, if. If the person you love, like, touches your hand, if. If you get, like an A from. From the teacher, like, you're going to get a hit of dopamine, and that's what, that's what your reward is. That's. It's pretty old. It's an old idea. At least it dates back to the middle of the 20th century, which is. We're getting further and further away from. Which makes me gulp. But that idea being discredited is pretty old, too. Like, it didn't last very long. The problem is its legacy stuck around for a really long time. It's still around today.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. There was a researcher speaking of old named James olds in the 50s and 60s who did some experiments with rats and said, hey, every time I give these rats a little electrical stimulation in just the right place right there behind the ear, they're going to keep pulling that lever down or whatever act I'm making them do. They'll just do that over and over and over and over and over, as long as I keep stimulating that area, right?

[Josh Clark]

So what they said was, okay, there's something going on with dopamine in this, I guess, pleasurable act that the rat is doing to itself. And that got followed up. That got followed up in the 70s by a guy named Roy Wise, who depleted dopamine receptors in rats and found that they would not seek out food, and they wouldn't seek out methamphetamines that were just there on the offer. Those rats could have as much meth as they wanted. And they were like, nah, I don't want any. And crucially, critically, Roy Wise and his colleagues misinterpreted that as a lack of experience of pleasure, not a lack of motivation. And it wasn't until the 80s that some other people came along and were like, no, we've been getting this wrong all this time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, in the 80s, they use sugar instead of methamphetamine, I guess. And once again, very kind of cruelly, they cut off. They didn't allow them any dopamine. They killed them off with drugs. But this time, they gave them the sugar, and they said they're liking the sugar. You can tell by the look on that little guy's face that he enjoys it. But. And this is the key, it's not coming back and saying, give me more sugar. Give me more sugar.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Or, give me more meth.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

So this whole thing, this changed our understanding, at least in academia, among people who study this kind of thing, we realized we were misinterpreting what we were seeing and that a lack of dopamine didn't lead to a lack of pleasure called an ahedonia or anhedonia. It was a lack of motivation to seek out that pleasure. That's the effect of not having enough dopamine that we found from those rat tests. So, like, this whole new framework of understanding, it kind of came along because, to be clear, dopamine is very much associated with things that give us pleasure. And it does seem like the more pleasurable something is, the more dopamine gets released. Like, for example, I think I saw, like, eating something that tastes really good increases your dopamine levels by 100% sometimes. But cocaine increases your dopamine levels 10 times that. So the more intense the pleasurable experience is, the more dopamine gets released. So it's definitely associated with it. What they found is, like, the dopamine is not making you feel pleasure. There's something else involved. It's just. It's never caught with the smoking gun, but it's always there when the dead body's found. And it has this mysterious smile on its face because it knows you can't prove anything.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, well, it's liking versus wanting. And that's a theory of reward behavior where liking is that pleasure that hit you get right when you put that bite of peanut butter pie in your mouth. Is that pleasure wanting is the motivation to earn the reward that you get out of having that peanut butter pie. Like, you know, you're up in the hotel room, they don't have room service, but you can get up out of bed and you can get dressed and you can get down the stairs because the elevator's broken and get that peanut butter pie if you want to. But dopamine isn't enough to motivate you to get up and go get that peanut butter pie necessarily, even though you have great, great memories of the taste of it on your tongue. And you love that stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Right. But if you do get up and go get that peanut butter pie, that means that in the past, you've had peanut butter pie or have created an image of the peanut butter pie you've never had. That's so great that the dopamine is produced in enough amounts to actually get you up, out of bed, dressed, and going down the stairs to get that peanut butter pie. They're related in that way.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, absolutely. So it's not actually causing the pleasure. It's just influencing how your brain is taking all this stuff in, basically. And there are a couple of different ways of looking at how this happens. There's one theory called that it's prediction error. So you get more bang for your buck. Basically, you expected to like that peanut butter piece, but this was the best peanut butter pie you've ever had, maybe the best dessert you've ever had in your life. And you were like, wow, that. Your brain says, that was way, way better than I thought it was going to be. So it reinforces it.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And to put it in kind of computational terms, dopamine is a prediction error. Somehow that chemical measures the difference between what you expected and the amazing reward you got. And the greater the difference, the more pronounced the connection that dopamine is going to make between going and getting peanut butter pie and eating peanut butter pie. So you'll have more motivation to do it next time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. The other way of thinking about it is the dopamine itself is the motivational signal. So it's what makes me get out of that bed and put on my clothes and actually go down those stairs, because I'm motivated to go get that reward.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And this is where that awakenings anecdote comes in.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's hear it.

[Josh Clark]

So you were talking about how, you know, the peanut butter pie motivating you to get out of bed and actually go. That definitely jibes with research, particularly something reported by Oliver Sacks in the book. And then later, the movie Awakenings, there was an epidemic of something called encephalitic lethargia, which is what happened to Robert De Niro's character. Remember, as a boy, he caught this thing and he just kind of froze in place. It's where you develop Parkinson's symptoms so much that you just don't. You can't move. You don't. You're. You're. You cannot move. You have. You don't have the required dopamine to actually move. So you're just sitting there frozen in place like a statue. But anybody who saw this movie remembers being amazed by this scene. If a certain patient is stimulated, their dopamine is stimulated just enough, they can actually overcome that being frozen in place. And so there's a famous scene where Oliver Sacks tossed one of the patients some oranges, and she caught them like she was a frozen statue. And all of a sudden, she's catching oranges and then juggles with them.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Or there's another patient that was on the beach, I believe, in their wheelchair, saw someone drowning and. And was motivated to get up and go save the person and then come back and go back to this frozen statue kind of stasis.

[Chuck Bryant]

Great scene.

[Josh Clark]

It is so like that. That has to do with the motivational aspect of dopamine, and that given the right stimulus, even something that tremendous as just a crazy amount of Parkinson's symptoms can be overcome or overwhelmed by. By that dopamine hit.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, absolutely. And then jumping back to that first one, the prediction error, they've done research on people who gamble, who play cards and play the slot machines and stuff, and they. Their brains experience about the same amount of dopamine activity when they almost win. Like, you got that big pot in the middle of the table, you're playing poker, and you lose at the last second, your dopamine level will be about the same as if you had actually won it.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Which is pretty remarkable.

[Josh Clark]

And then I think it kind of qualifies as a third interpretation. The most current study I've seen sees dopamine as essentially the thing that allows us to learn. If you connect one thing to another, it's because dopamine had you make that connection. And then depending on what kind of effect those two things have on you, that connection might be very, very strong, so you're motivated to go seek it out again. But at base, what dopamine is doing is allowing us to form connections. Imagine the world if we didn't connect one thing to another. Like, if I didn't connect Turning on the computer and stepping up to the microphone and recording a podcast. Like, we wouldn't do anything. We would just be completely lost if we couldn't make connections. And. And it seems like dopamine is the basis of all that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

[Josh Clark]

Like, the whole world would suffer because we wouldn't be podcasting, Chuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, that's debatable. You know, we're not poo pooing the idea that addiction and dopamine are heavily tied with one another. We're just sort of trying to point out that there's a lot of other things at play when it comes to dopamine. And that sort of is unfairly maybe gotten all the press. But we do have to talk about it some more. We talked about it plenty of times, certainly in our addiction podcast episodes. But it does play a pretty big role in drug abuse and addiction. It does reinforce the idea that you want to keep using those drugs because it's making you feel good. And when we're talking about. You're talking about the woman juggling oranges in that movie and how remarkable that is. If they've given you Parkinson's drugs and they just flood your brain with dopamine, they found that 10% of the people that have had that treatment turn into gambling addicts. And I would imagine they're people who already gambled. I don't think it drove them to start gambling. But that just goes to show you the power of what a flood of dopamine will do to your brain. And it's a pretty clunky way to deal with it, I think.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think that's what you were referring to earlier when you were saying that understanding of volume transmission, theory of dopamine release. That's what the drugs are based on that understanding or that misunderstanding. And yeah, that's what happens. It's like, yes, if it does crawl across the brain and runs into whatever neurons that it can trigger, it's going to have all sorts of other knock on effects.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, totally.

[Josh Clark]

So I guess our current understanding of how dopamine relates to addiction is that it connects drugs with pleasure. And as I was saying before, the more intense the experience, especially the reward, you can have a negative experience. And I think they're starting to figure out dopamine has something to do with that too. But as far as we know, the more intense the reward, the greater the flood of dopamine. And so the greater, the stronger the connection you make between pressing a lever and a scientist giving you a bunch

[Chuck Bryant]

of meth yeah, absolutely. But that is to be clear, just part of the recipe of what leads to addiction. Maybe there are people out there saying that, but I don't know if anyone really is saying it's all because of dopamine. It is part of the recipe and addition obviously to your genetics. Just the fact that drugs are out there and available and their environmental pressures and influences, all kinds of reasons that people start to take drugs or continue to take drugs. And as far as the continuation, dopamine is definitely a part of it.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And so one of the ways that you learn to take drugs is not just from the, the fact that your, your brain is flooded with dopamine, which allows you to make that connection very strongly, but the brain actually changes in response to those increased floods of dopamine because it's not set up to release dopamine like that repeatedly over long periods of time. It can do it once in a while. Yeah, but you, you, you can't really do it too often because then the brain responds by shutting down dopamine receptors. The problem is, is that this means that you have to do more drugs to get that sensation, as far as you know. And that's what creates the cycle of addiction. That to me smells vaguely of being almost out of date.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

[Josh Clark]

But it does make sense then that the ideal drug would trigger a maximum release of feel good chemicals, but a minimum release of dopamine. If anybody could ever come up with a drug like that, people would be able to do drugs all the time. They'd never get addicted.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure. But they have other negative effects on the body.

[Josh Clark]

Sure, sure. Can't forget about that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah. The other bad thing, obviously, if you're gonna do the amount of drugs it takes to shut down your dopamine receptors, cause your body's like, wait, wait, wait, this isn't right. Let me shut this down. Is it's not just shutting down the dopamine receptor that makes you want to do more cocaine or whatever, it's just shutting your dopamine receptors down. So you mentioned it earlier, anhedonia. That's the idea that you don't receive pleasure from any activity. And if all of a sudden your dopamine has been shut down such because you've been doing drugs, that you're not getting any kind of pleasant feel good stimulation from life, then that could be another reason that you up your desire to do drugs.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And then there's one other factor involved that with fewer dopamine receptor sites, remember you said that one of those dopaminergic pathways is related to executive function, like impulse control, responsibility, that kind of stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Well, with lower levels of dopamine, the theory goes that you are more likely to engage in reckless behavior to get drugs. You might do things that you normally wouldn't do, not because you're just this addict who has to have it, but partially also because you don't have the impulse control that you did before you became addicted to drugs and your dopamine receptors started shutting down.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, and I think that's. I mean, we talked about it in the addiction app. It's not just the effect that the drug has on your body, the negative effects that it physiologically has on your body, but the behaviors that you start engaging in when you're under the influence of drugs and want more drugs and maybe can't find the drugs. That's maybe almost worse than the physiological ramifications, you know?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah, for sure. And it also ties in with risk taking, because dopamine is connected to risk taking. And in fact, they found that some people seem to be biologically physiologically predisposed to risk taking based on their dopamine levels, that, in fact, they find that they have fewer, what are called autoreceptors. Apparently, over time, we've evolved to create on dopamine neural cells a site called an autoreceptor that actually catches some of the dopamine. It helps regulate it. Like, it never makes it out. So it keeps the amount of dopamine down to a regulated level. So the fewer autoreceptors you have, if you're still pumping out dopamine, you get a much greater impact from that dopamine. And they have correlated that to risk taking. People who have fewer dopaminergic autoreceptors take more risks, at least according to some studies.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And they've also done studies where they found that that risk should or needs to be tied to a reward, like a gain, basically. There was a study from the University of College in London in 2015 that said subjects whose dopamine levels was higher, it was boosted artificially with medication, would choose risky options more often if it involved a potential gain. They didn't see that same thing going on if there was a potential loss involved. So there's definitely a tie to a gain or another way of saying that would be a reward.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And then also that impulse control is also a huge hallmark of ADHD symptoms. And so ADHD is very commonly associated with some sort of dopamine deficiency. And from what I've seen, there isn't a, like an across the board, we haven't discovered some across the board type of brain that's like, yep, if you have this brain, you have ADHD and vice versa. Um, and we're not even certain exactly what effect the dopamine is having. We're almost just kind of like seeing effects that, that are the behavior of people with ADHD and saying, hey, that we know that dopamine does that or if you don't have dopamine, you're more likely to do this. So there's this correlation. It's just not, we just, it's, it's never been like completely shown yet. I think it probably will be at some time. But we don't really know how ADHD is linked to dopamine. But there's, we're almost certain that dopamine drives at least some of the ADHD symptoms. It's just because of that people have made leaps in understanding. Like there's a, there's a long standing myth about people with ADHD that they do these impulsive behaviors to get a hit of dopamine. Well, it's based on that old idea that dopamine is a, a pleasure producing chemical or reward producing chemical where instead it might be that people do these behaviors that are impulsive because they don't have the dopamine that can regulate their impulses and so they have less impulse control. We're just still sorting it out, I guess.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. All right. Should we take our final break here?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll take a break and we'll talk about. Oh boy, it's going to be so much fun social media right after this.

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[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so we're back and we promised talk of social media because I think everyone is pretty hip to the fact now that notifications and the dings and the likes and the loves and the hearts and all the things that come through various interacting with various social media platforms.

[Josh Clark]

You just sounded so old, dude.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know. That's great. In this case, I love being old. I don't want any of it.

[Josh Clark]

I'm with you.

[Chuck Bryant]

But in any case, all of that stuff combines to give you a hit of dopamine and it's specific and you're like, fine, that's great, whatever. But it's specifically structured and built that way and coded that way so that you will become addicted to that social media platform. And they have admitted as such, in 2018 it was a big news item when they were, I don't know, it was like congressional testimony or something. Can't remember exactly, but there was a VP at Facebook who came out and was basically like, hey, this is something we did on purpose. And it was a core foundation. Was the really the quote that kind of stuck out with how people behave using our platform. Like it was a part of the core strategy to get people to come back again and again and again.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, and that strategy was based on this was Chamath Palihapidiya who was a VP of user development at Facebook. And they said that this was based on short term dopamine driven feedback loops. And this is all old news to us now. I mean this was six years ago. Think about how much our understanding of what social media does to us. But in 2018, that was a groundbreaking admission. But it's true. And I mean that's essentially how social media works. Like, you get the app and you start to realize that if that little badge number comes up and says, hey, you have like two notifications. You go into it, you're going to get some sort of reward of some sort. You're going to, like you said, get a ding or a like or a heart or something like that. And that is a reward to you. And so based on the mesolimbic theory of dopamine, we get a dopamine hit and so we learn to come back. And apparently also randomness has a lot to do with it because as we start to be able to predict when we'll get a reward, that dopamine stops being a part of that whole experience. So if it can be done randomly, we don't know when we're going to get a reward. It has a maximum effect of releasing dopamine and thus teaching us to go back to social media over and over and over again.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, totally. There's also this psychiatrist named Dr. Cameron S E P A H, I guess sepah. Is that how you'd say it then?

[Josh Clark]

Sepah or sipah? Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

One of those three who came out and said, all right, there's this term that I'm gonna float out there and it's called a dopamine fast. And the idea when that was floated was people heard that and they said, oh well, dopamine just means it's just a catch all term basically for any sort of addictive behavior like reinforcement. And you can go on a dopamine fast and like, you know, put that social media app down for a couple of weeks and when you come back, it's just gonna, like, your brain's gonna have a little rest from that thing and you're gonna feel amazing about how much you love it when you come back. And that's not at all what Dr. Cameron was talking about or meant.

[Josh Clark]

No. Dr. Sipa Seppa was basically saying like, like he really misused dopamine fast and even said to the New York Times, like, I didn't mean it like that. Don't, don't take it like that. I don't mean it literally. Everybody said, too late, we're going to take it literally. And so there was a, this, this movement, I think people still do it, of self denial of everything from, like, people stopped interacting with other people, people stopped eating foods they found pleasurable, they stopped talking if they didn't need to. Anything that could conceivably give you a release of dopamine. And their premise was that if they did that, it would be like going and drying out on heroin or cocaine. So that when you come back that, that first experience again with heroin or cocaine is that much more amazing because you've kind of replenished your endocannabinoids and opioids and all that stuff. Dopamine does not work like that. If you stop flooding your brain with dopamine, it doesn't replenish. It doesn't need to replenish. That's not how it works. But that's what people were doing. They just completely misinterpreted it and it was based on faulty science. And Dr. Siepa essentially using the wrong term.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I think the idea that he was talking about was, hey, put that stuff down and go do other things that you find pleasure in. Live in the world or go out in nature or, you know, kind of get ahold of your life again so you don't feel like you're, you know, tied to this social media app for your happiness.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Our moms used to call it going to play outside for a while.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Or summer, I think is another term it used to be called.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But instead this guy called it a dopamine fast and people really took a left turn with it. So he identified six compulsive behaviors or categories that he was saying you could really do good for yourself by taking a dopamine fast or a break from emotional eating, excessive Internet usage and gaming, gambling and shopping, porn and masturbation, thrill and novelty seeking, which I took to mean taking a break from thrill kill, murder sprees and recreational drugs. But he also said, you know, anything that you feel like has got a hold on your life, if you just stop and step away from it, it will have less a hold of your life. So TV would definitely be in there, probably for a lot of people.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But if you step back and look at what this guy's talking about, it's the most basic thing that people have been doing for eons. And yet just by slapping dopamine fast on it, it became sticky and buzzy and brainstorm Brava, Stormy and like super corporate. And people just really got into it and started thinking like, you know, if I, if I fast from dopamine, when I come back, I'm going to have so much dopamine that I'm going to be the most motivated, focused, greatest UXPM of all time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Thanks a lot.

[Josh Clark]

And that's just not how it works, unfortunately.

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I guess that's a weird way to end this whole thing, but that's how it ends, huh? Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, that's our current understanding.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I feel like this is one we would be able to do five years from now just to kind of revisit. What do you think? Nah. Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, we've never done that.

[Josh Clark]

That's dopamine as we understand it in 2024, everybody.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to know more about dopamine, go out and read about it, but be very specific and selective of who you go read. There are some popular people who know what they're talking about out there, but there's plenty that don't. So I guess if you run across somebody who refers to dopamine as a pleasure chemical or something like that, just turn around and walk away and go find somebody else.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

How about that, Chuck?

[Chuck Bryant]

That sounds good.

[Josh Clark]

Chuck said that sounds good, everybody. And that means it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm going to call this from a conductor. We heard from quite a few conductors so far, and that's just on day one after release. So it's pretty great to know that there are people out there that know about this stuff better than we do.

[Josh Clark]

That's amazing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey guys, thank you so much for the episode about conductors. I squealed with joy when I saw it in my feed as I started my hour long commute. I teach high school orchestra and I'm an orchestral. Orchestral, excuse me, musician with former aspirations of becoming a professional conductor. So it's fun to hear an outsider's Perspective. You're wondering what exactly is on each musician stand during a performance. I love Chuck's analogy of it being like an actor script with only their lines. And that's pretty close. But sometimes there are small annotations of what to listen for from other sections of the orchestra, particularly after a long section of inactive playing or rests to help figure out where you are in the music. That's the part. Remember, I just couldn't believe there'd be like nothing to cue you. And I saw other stuff where there were sometimes numeric notations and other conductors said there were long bars and things that you would pay attention to. Back to the email, though. This is another key job of the conductor, which you didn't touch on as much as they have the entire score. They often give entrance cues to specific instrumentalists or sections. Additionally, there are usually rehearsal markers that delineate the beginnings of phrases or larger sections. This not only makes rehearsing easier, but also gives greater structure and scaffolding to the player. It's similar to punctuation or paragraph structure in a novel. Experienced musicians can often almost more or less feel their entrances based on their contextual knowledge of the piece and the music. Phrasing. There's an old adage that you spend your time practicing at home to learn your part. Rehearsal time is spent learning everyone else's.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, that's cool.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's pretty good. The conductor is a facilitator of this process. You hit the nail on the head, guys. The interpreter of the score. That is from Brittany.

[Josh Clark]

Man, Chuck, we did it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, we got, I think four or five conductors all wrote in and said like, we did a pretty darn good job on it. So that feels great.

[Josh Clark]

Tell me they said bravo.

[Chuck Bryant]

I didn't see it.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Bravo.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sorry.

[Josh Clark]

I mean, we'll get one someday. Yeah, that's pretty great. Who is that from? Brittany.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, Brittany.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks a lot, Brittany. We appreciate that. And to all the conductors who wrote in, thank you to you all. And if you want to be like all the conductors who wrote in, like Brittany, you can send us an email too. Send it off to Stuff podcastheartradio.com

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[Josh Clark]

you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Everyone deserves to be connected.

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this is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? Business software is expensive, and when you buy software from lots of different companies, it's not only expensive, it gets confusing. Slow to use, hard to integrate. Odoo solves that because all Odoo software is connected on a single, affordable platform. Save money without missing out on the features you need. Odoo has no hidden costs and no limit on features or data. Odoo has over 60 apps available for any needs your business might have, all at no additional charge. Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting. All linked and talking to each other. Check out Odoo at o d o o dot com. That's o d o o com.

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[Josh Clark]

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