Dr. Kent Berridge
speaker
525 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 4 Aug
Dr. Kent Berridge’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
No one starts as a sensitized individual when they start taking drugs.
Just as you say, they take it for the pleasure of the drugs, for the social milieu to fit in, for all the various reasons a person might, but it's not a sensitized want at that point.
And many people, most people who start taking drugs are not going to develop sensitized wants.
There's a lot of individual differences in vulnerability to sensitization of this dopamine system.
And many people are fairly resistant at street doses, so they don't become very sensitized.
But some individuals are susceptible, some very, very susceptible.
And if they're taking drugs, especially if they're taking them in sort of a binge-like fashion, you know, like on weekends, not on the weekdays, but then on the weekends again, sort of spaced apart binges,
That's the ideal sort of recipe for developing sensitization of the brain mesolimbic dopamine system.
Yes, I think that's true.
I mean, it's something we stumbled into.
I've always been interested in pleasure and desire, you know, motivation and emotion.
But the difference between wanting and liking is just something we stumbled into.
We weren't expecting it.
That is exactly what our work explains.
You know, that would be sort of the poster child for incentive sensitization forms of addiction.
well i have to say that when i began my career decades ago i didn't think there really was a difference you know at that time we all thought there was a unitary brain reward system sort of centered on dopamine mesolimbic dopamine and that it would cause both liking and wanting um that the two words were basically synonyms for the same psychological process of reward it's something you want and something you like
There was lots of evidence for that, and my beginnings were intended to add just a little bit more evidence to the dopamine as pleasure-liking hypothesis.
And I was disappointed that I couldn't do it.
In our hands, we were asking the question a little bit differently from earlier studies by others.
And in our hands, dopamine was not pleasure-liking.
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