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're going to talk about an extremely important topic that's central to our daily life, and that's motivation. We're going to talk about pleasure and reward. What underlies our sense of pleasure or reward? We're going to talk about addictions as well. We're going to talk about the neurochemistry of drive and mindset.
But for now, let's just talk about the neuroscience of motivation and reward, of pleasure and pain, because those are central to what we think of as emotions, whether or not we feel good, whether or not we feel we're on track in life, whether or not we feel we're falling behind. So motivation is fundamental to our daily life. It's what allows us to get out of bed in the morning.
It's what allows us to pursue long-term goals or short-term goals. Motivation and the chemistry of motivation is tightly wound in with the neurochemistry of movement. In fact, the same single molecule, dopamine, is responsible for our sense of motivation and motivation for movement. It's a fascinating molecule and it lies at the center of so many great things in life.
And it lies at the center of so many terrible aspects of life, namely addiction and certain forms of mental disease. So if ever there was a double-edged blade in the world of neuroscience, it's dopamine. there's a fundamental relationship between dopamine released in your brain and your desire to exert effort.
And you can actually control the schedule of dopamine release, but it requires the appropriate knowledge. This is one of those cases where understanding the way the dopamine system works will allow you to leverage it to your benefit. Let's get a few basic facts on the table.
Dopamine was discovered in the late 1950s, and it was discovered as the precursor, meaning the thing from which epinephrine or adrenaline is made. Epinephrine is the same thing as adrenaline, except in the brain we call it epinephrine. Epinephrine allows us to get into action.
It stimulates changes in the blood vessels, in the heart, in the organs and tissues of the body that bias us for movement. Dopamine was initially thought to be just the building block for epinephrine. However, dopamine does a lot of things on its own. It's not always converted to epinephrine.
Dopamine is released from several sites in the brain and body, but perhaps the most important one for today's discussion about motivation and reward is something that's sometimes just called the reward pathway. For the aficionados, it's sometimes called the mesolimbic reward pathway. but it's fundamentally important to your desire to engage in action.
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