Dr. Ben Rein

speaker

1,093 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 10 Jun

Dr. Ben Rein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Liz Moody Podcast · Stanford Neuroscientist: THIS Is The Secret To Living Longer (It's Not Diet Or Exercise) · 10 Jun 2026 podcast

Definitely not medical advice, but I have heard of a lot of people doing that.

And I've even heard of like doctors and nurses and medical professionals taking painkillers before they go to work because they see so much carnage and so much pain that it helps them kind of stay separate from it.

Yeah.

SSRIs, they're selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

What that means is that they basically boost serotonin signaling.

So your brain cells are more likely to send each other serotonin and receive serotonin signals.

There's a lot of evidence, especially like emerging evidence, some of it being my own research, showing that serotonin is really key for connection and just like interaction in general.

In fact, my own research found, we studied this in mice and we found that MDMA, which is one of the strongest drivers of empathy, the way it drives empathy is by driving serotonin specifically in this brain area called the nucleus accumbens.

And also studies have found that if you just go in a mouse and you stimulate that same pathway, serotonin, in the nucleus accumbens, all of a sudden they want to hang out with each other more.

They empathize with each other more.

SSRIs also...

amplify serotonin in the brain.

So it would make sense that theoretically, maybe they make us more social.

There's studies showing that when people are taking SSRIs, they become more extroverted.

And you might think, well, they're not depressed anymore.

Right, exactly.

But the researchers controlled for that.

And they found that there was not a correlation between how strong the antidepressant effects were.

So simply boosting serotonin maybe made them more interested in socializing, just like the mice.

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