Chapter 1: What is dopamine and why is it often misunderstood?
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Hey, everybody. Happy Saturday. Chuck here with a curated Selects episode in which we bring out a classic from Dusted Off from the Old Dustbin. So you can give it a listen. This one is called How Dopamine Works. And it's one of, obviously, one of our more sciencey episodes. And I managed to struggle to get through it because, you know, I'm not good at these. But it was a great episode.
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Chapter 2: How does dopamine function as a neurotransmitter in the brain?
Yep, we're wrong about that. Well, what about, yep, wrong about that. Basically, everything we know in popular culture. And, I mean, if you've even gone to, like, Cleveland Clinic website or WebMD website or Harvard Health has some articles, you'll see this old, antiquated, outdated data.
view of what dopamine is being kind of paraded around, the idea that it's a pleasure-inducing chemical, that if something gives you pleasure, you're responding to a hit of dopamine, and that is just absolutely not true.
Yeah, and this may be the most oft-covered stuff-you-should-know thing that hasn't gotten its own title yet.
Yeah. Man, dopamine is the reigning champ right now.
Yeah, we talk about this stuff all the time, it seems like.
Yeah, we do because it comes up a lot. And the reason why is because it turns out it has a lot to do with more than just pleasure. Like everybody, yes, it is associated with pleasure, just not the way we've thought for very long. And it does a lot of other stuff too. Essentially, what it does is it signals things. It says, hey, you behave or you act up. You stop behaving. Something like that.
I'm not quite sure exactly what it says. I don't speak dopamine. But it's a neurotransmitter, so it's a chemical messenger in the brain at base. But it's associated with so many different things that, of course, dopamine comes up all the time in our podcast.
It sure does. So it is, like you said, a neurotransmitter, one of more than 100 of those bad boys functioning in our bodies. And like you said, it lets things communicate. It's a facilitator, but it gets all the press for its, you know, like the feel-good stuff that you mentioned, addiction behaviors, whether it's gambling or drugs or
Or the thrill of, you know, those people that walk around on ledges and stuff.
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Chapter 3: What are the different pathways and receptors related to dopamine?
Opposable thumbs maybe?
Sure. But I mean what are opposable thumbs if you can't get the wherewithal to move it?
True. But if you had the wherewithal to move it and you couldn't grab something, you'd probably be pretty frustrated.
Yes, you can. You can use the heels of both hands, just like a thumb.
Are you underselling the opposable thumb?
Yes. I'm sick of the opposable thumb always hogging the spotlight. It's dopamine's time.
You can get those removed, you know. See how you do.
That sounds like a dare to me, Chuck. Say goodbye to your tennis game. I can play it just by holding the racket with both heels of my hand.
Or I guess we should have said pickleball. That would be more current, right?
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Chapter 4: How does dopamine influence motivation and behavior?
That has a lot to do with executive functioning. Yeah. Prioritizing stuff, how your brain plans things, how it files away stuff, and how it, you know, how it organizes your overall sort of priorities.
Yeah.
Yes. And now it's time to talk about the most random dopaminergic pathway of all, the tubero-infundibular pathway. Tubero-infundibular. I think you had it right the first time. Okay. We'll edit out the second one then. All right. We'll put in a slide whistle over it. So that connects the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. And from what I can tell, I was like, well, what else does it do?
The sole role of this pathway is to block the production of milk or to, yes, to prevent the production of milk in the female breast of mammals. That's what it does. That's that pathway's role. Okay. And if you block that pathway, the milk production begins. Isn't that interesting?
Yeah. We talked about that in the two-parter, the old breastfeeding two-parter.
Oh, we did?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Oh, I don't remember that.
Yeah, yeah. Wow, you've got a great memory. No, I have a terrible memory. I know you're making fun of me. There's also the mesolimbic pathway. We've talked a lot about the limbic system in many episodes. But reward and emotion, and this is the one that gets all the press because this is the one that has to do with addiction. Pleasure. And we're going to talk a lot about reward.
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Chapter 5: What role does dopamine play in addiction?
And we learned that not too long ago, 2018 medical researchers at Harvard, released this paper and said, hey, guess what, everyone? It's the opposite of everything you've been saying, and everyone went, oh, okay, sorry about that. Sure.
My B. So after the dopamine is excreted and it does its job, it actually breaks down remarkably quickly. It turns into something, it's metabolized into something called homovenilic acid, right?
Yeah.
And from what I can tell, I don't know what the homo does to the vanillic acid, but vanillic acid is the flavor of vanilla. So from what I can tell, if you tasted the homo vanillic acid, which is like the metabolite found in cerebrospinal fluid that we test to see how much dopamine you have in your brain at any given time, it may taste like vanilla. Wow. Isn't that interesting?
Yeah.
It's gross. It is gross. And I don't know also if we said that just 20,000 neurons are capable of synthesizing dopamine, but that's a really small proportion of the total number of neurons we have, too, about 100 billion, I think.
Yeah, absolutely.
You want to take a break?
Yeah, we'll break and we'll talk about, well, what everyone wants to hear about, which is how dopamine and pleasure hold hands with one another.
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Chapter 6: How do dopamine levels affect pleasure and reward?
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So check this whole, I should say, misunderstanding of dopamine as the ultimate pleasure chemical. If you take a drag off a cigarette, if you snort a line of Coke, if the person you love like touches your hand, if you get like an A from the teacher, like you're going to get a hit of dopamine and that's what your reward is. It's pretty old. It's an old idea.
At least it dates back to the middle of the 20th century, which is we're getting further and further away from, which makes me gulp. But that idea being discredited is pretty old, too. Like, it didn't last very long. The problem is its legacy stuck around for a really long time. It's still around today. Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. There was a researcher, speaking of old, named James Olds in the 50s and 60s who did some experiments with rats and said, hey, every time I give these rats a little electrical stimulation in just the right place, right there behind the ear, they're going to keep pulling that lever down or whatever act I'm making them do.
They'll just do that over and over and over and over and over as long as I keep stimulating that area.
Right. So what they said was, okay, there's something going on with dopamine in this, I guess, pleasurable act that the rat is doing to itself. Whoa, whoa, whoa. That got followed up in the 70s by a guy named Roy Wise who depleted dopamine receptors in rats and found that they would not seek out food and they wouldn't seek out methamphetamines. that were just there on the offer.
Those rats could have as much meth as they wanted. And they were like, nah, I don't want any. And crucially, critically, Roy Wise and his colleagues misinterpreted that as a lack of experience of pleasure, not a lack of motivation. And it wasn't until the 80s that some other people came along and were like, no, we've been getting this wrong all this time.
Yeah, in the 80s, they used sugar instead of methamphetamine, I guess. And once again, very kind of cruelly, they cut off. They didn't allow them any dopamine. They killed them off with drugs. But this time they gave them the sugar, and they said they're liking the sugar. You can tell by the look on that little guy's face that he enjoys it.
But, and this is the key, it's not coming back and saying, give me more sugar, give me more sugar.
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Chapter 7: What is the relationship between dopamine and social media?
Like ā You know, you're up in the hotel room. They don't have room service. But you can get up out of bed and you can get dressed and you can get down the stairs because the elevator is broken and get that peanut butter pie if you want to.
But dopamine isn't enough to motivate you to get up and go get that peanut butter pie necessarily, even though you have great, great memories of the taste of it on your tongue and you love that stuff.
Right. But if you do get up and go get that peanut butter pie, that means that in the past you've had peanut butter pie or have created an image of the peanut butter pie you've never had that's so great that the dopamine is produced in enough amounts to actually get you up out of bed dressed and going down the stairs to get that peanut butter pie. They're related in that way.
Yeah, absolutely. So it's not actually causing the pleasure. It's just influencing how your brain is taking all this stuff in, basically. And there are a couple of different ways of looking at how this happens. There's one theory called a that it's prediction error. So you get you get more bang for your buck. Basically, you expected to like that peanut butter pie.
But this was the best peanut butter pie you've ever had. Maybe the best dessert you've ever had in your life. And you're like, wow, that your brain says that was way, way better than I thought it was going to be. So it reinforces it.
Right. And to put it in kind of computational terms, dopamine is a prediction error. Somehow that chemical measures the difference between what you expected and the amazing reward you got. And the greater the difference, the more pronounced a connection that dopamine is going to make between going and getting peanut butter pie and eating peanut butter pie.
So you'll have more motivation to do it next time.
Yeah. The other way of thinking about it is the dopamine itself is the motivational signal. So it's what makes me get out of that bed and put on my clothes and actually go down those stairs because I'm motivated to go get that reward.
Right. And this is where that awakenings anecdote comes in. Let's hear it. So you were talking about how, you know, the peanut butter pie motivating you to get out of bed and actually go. That definitely jibes with research, particularly something reported by Oliver Sacks in the book and then later the movie Awakenings. There was an epidemic of something called encephalitic lethargia.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of dopamine for mental health and behavior?
And then depending on what kind of effect those two things have on you, that connection might be very, very strong. So you're motivated to go seek it out again. But at base, what dopamine is doing is allowing us to form connections. Imagine the world.
If we didn't connect one thing to another, like if I didn't connect turning on the computer and stepping up to the microphone and recording a podcast, like we wouldn't do anything. We would just be completely lost if we couldn't make connections. And it seems like dopamine is the basis of all that.
Yeah, pretty cool.
Like the whole world would suffer because we wouldn't be podcasting, Chuck. Well, that's debatable.
You know, we're not poo-pooing the idea that addiction and dopamine are heavily tied with one another. We're just sort of trying to point out that there's a lot of other things at play when it comes to dopamine, and that sort of has unfairly maybe gotten all the press. But we do have to talk about it some more. We talked about it. Plenty of time, certainly in our addiction podcast episodes.
But it does play a pretty big role in drug abuse and addiction. It does reinforce the idea that you want to keep using those drugs because it's making you feel good. And when we're talking about ā you're talking about the woman juggling oranges in that movie and how remarkable that is.
If they've given you Parkinson's drugs and they just flood your brain with dopamine, they found that 10 percent of the people that have had that treatment turn into gambling addicts. And I would imagine they're people who already gambled. I don't think it like drove them to start gambling.
Yeah.
But that just goes to show you the power of like what a flood of dopamine will do to your brain. And it's a pretty clunky way to deal with it, I think.
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