Shankar Vedantam

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This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

In today's episode, we heard part of our 2023 conversation with psychiatrist Anna Lemke.

She's author of the book, Dopamine Nation, Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.

We talked about the balance between pain and pleasure in our brains and how our modern lives may be throwing off that balance.

We received a flood of listener questions and comments when our episodes with Anna first aired.

We're going to turn now to Your Questions Answered, the segment that we released not long after those episodes came out.

I started by asking Anna if she was surprised at the widespread public interest in the topic.

And I think many people are seeing that they live in a sea of plenty, and yet there are rising rates of anxiety and depression.

People see this.

People see the paradox.

And in some ways, I think you are giving them a way to resolve that paradox.

So as I said, we received a number of questions about the nature of addiction.

Let me start with this one from a listener named Michelle.

What do you think, Anna?

Is there a reason why some people are drawn to some sources of addiction and not to others?

In some ways, I think, Ana, you just anticipated the next question, which comes from listener Ron, who is asking the question, are some people more vulnerable to addictions in general?