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

The podcast features an interview with Anna Lembke, an expert on dopamine, who explains the importance of dopamine for survival, pleasure, reward, and motivation. She clarifies common misconceptions about dopamine and addiction, emphasizing that addiction is not to dopamine itself, but to substances or behaviors that release dopamine. Lembke uses the analogy of a balance scale to illustrate how pleasure and pain are co-located in the brain and how the brain tries to maintain homeostasis. She discusses how easily accessible synthetic sources of dopamine in the modern world can lead to addiction, as the brain's reward system becomes overwhelmed, changing the hedonic set point and requiring more potent stimuli to feel normal.