Dr. Kent Berridge

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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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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We're Out of Time · Wanting vs Liking: Why Addiction Isn't About Pleasure | Dr. Kent Berridge · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

Well, the distinction is important because when you turn on dopamine systems, particularly selectively, you get intense wanting, but you do not intensify the pleasure.

This is what we began to find out.

It's calling you.

Absolutely right.

There's a lot of disappointments along the way.

I mean, I really wanted dopamine to be pleasure when I started out.

And when in our hands, we were asking a little bit differently, you know, the earlier experiments have been how much would animals work for these rewards if they wouldn't work if you suppress dopamine?

How much would they consume?

Well, they wouldn't consume if you suppress dopamine.

We were asking a little bit more, starting with the pleasure of taste, the way parents would ask their newborn infants for thousands of years, does the infant like the kinds of foods we eat by giving just a little taste of that food to the infant and seeing does the baby sort of smile and lick its lips or does the baby gape and shake its head and, you know, really not like that food.

Great apes have similar facial expressions, chimpanzees and orangutans.

Monkeys also do.

And it turns out that even rats, which are omnivores like us, that is, they like sweet and fatty and salty foods.

They don't like bitter foods.

So they'll eat just about the same foods that we eat.

They'll show some of the same facial expressions to sugar and then opposite facial expressions to bitter.

When we started with dopamine, we started suppressing dopamine or taking it away.

And we expected the positive liking reactions to sugar to go down.

And it never did.

Then we started turning on the dopamine system, say, with an electrode to stimulate the dopamine neurons.

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