Full Episode
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are going to talk all about dopamine and what drives you to do the things that you do.
We're going to talk about motivation and desire and craving, but also how dopamine relates to satisfaction and our feelings of wellbeing. So let's talk about dopamine. If ever you've interacted with somebody who just doesn't seem to have any drive, they've given up,
or if you've interacted with somebody who seems to have endless drive and energy, what you are looking at there in those two circumstances is without question a difference in the level of dopamine circulating in their system. Dopamine is what we call a neuromodulator. Neuromodulators are different than neurotransmitters.
Neurotransmitters are involved in the dialogue between neurons, whereas neuromodulators influence the communication of many neurons. In the nervous system, what this means is that dopamine release changes the probability that certain neural circuits will be active and that other neural circuits will be inactive. So how does dopamine work and what does it do?
Well, first of all, it is not just responsible for pleasure. It is responsible for motivation and drive, also for craving. Those three things are sort of the same, motivation, drive, and craving. It also controls time perception.
This turns out to be important to not end up addicted to substances, but it also turns out to be very important to sustain effort and be a happy person over long periods of time, which I think most everybody Dopamine is also vitally important for movement.
I'll explain the neural circuits for dopamine and mindset and dopamine in movement in a moment, but in diseases like Parkinson's or Lewy's body's dementia, which is similar to Parkinson's in many ways. There's a depletion or death of dopamine neurons at a particular location in the brain, which leads to shaky movements, challenges in speaking, challenges in particular in initiating movement.
And because dopamine is depleted elsewhere too, people with Parkinson's and Louie's, excuse me, Louie body dementia also experience drops in motivation and affect, meaning mood. They tend to get depressed and so on. when those people are properly treated.
They can recover some fluidity of movement, some ability to initiate movement, and almost without question, those people feel better psychologically, not just because they can move, but also because dopamine impacts mood and motivation. So what are the, underlying neural circuits. You have two main neural circuits in the brain that dopamine uses in order to exert all its effects.
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