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
Well, I'm sure many addicts do stop chasing pleasure and do start chasing relief.
And my guess would be that this would happen, especially when distress is sort of mounting, either because of their addiction and heavy drug use problems in life and withdrawal sorts of syndromes, or for other reasons.
Once distress is high, then that gives you another reason to take drugs.
But that's still different from a sensitized wanting.
That's...
It is possible to have this distress relief motive without being sensitized yet.
If they've sensitized their mesolimbic dopamine system, that's what's happening is when they think of taking drugs, kind of vividly imagine it, or if they're encountering cues related to taking drugs, this triggers hyperreactivity, a hyperactivation in the dopamine system itself and in the structures that it's connected to.
In neuroimaging studies of addiction, what this looks like is sort of lighting up to a very intense degree of these brain limbic emotional reward structures, like the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex, when the person's looking at the drug cues.
It lights up much higher than a person who would just be a recreational user.
It's this intense limbic activation.
And psychologically, what it's causing is a very, very intense desire, far more intense than most of us experience,
in our day-to-day lives.
We're all capable of that kind of intensity of a desire, but many of us will never actually experience it.
A sensitized person can experience it triggered by drug cues, especially and even intensified further if they're encountering those cues in a moment of psychological stress or emotional excitement.
So the intensity can actually be kind of surprising on certain occasions because it's rising above what a person's used to coping with.
Cue-triggered wanting, that's the essence of this addictive urge.
The dopamine receptor is not the pleasure center of the brain.
We all thought it was, and some people still think it is.
The dopamine neurons are talking to other neurons, say in the nucleus accumbens.
Some of those nucleus accumbens neurons with opioid receptors or endocannabinoid receptors, they can cause true intense pleasure.
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