Chuck

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.

Great scene.

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, uh, 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'd lose at the last second.

Uh,

your dopamine level will be about the same as if you had actually won it.

Yes.

Which is pretty remarkable.

Yeah, pretty cool.

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 has unfairly maybe gotten all the press.

But we do have to talk about it some more.

We talked about it.

Plenty of time, 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.