Video summary
In this episode of Huberman Lab Essentials, Professor Andrew Huberman explores the neuroscience of motivation and reward, centering on the critical role of dopamine. Discovered in the late 1950s as a precursor to epinephrine (adrenaline), dopamine was initially thought to merely facilitate movement but is now understood as the primary molecule driving desire, craving, and action. The core machinery for this system involves neurons originating in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) that project to the nucleus accumbens, creating a reward pathway often likened to an accelerator pedal. This biological circuitry evolved not to generate addiction but to motivate essential survival behaviors like seeking food or mates; however, it is highly susceptible to hijacking by substances and activities that trigger massive dopamine releases, such as cocaine (which can increase levels 1000-fold) or high-speed video games, leading to compulsive pursuit. Huberman clarifies a fundamental distinction between the experience of pleasure and the drive for motivation: while serotonin acts as a "here-and-now" molecule promoting contentment with what one already has, dopamine is about wanting more to relieve future pain or craving. He explains that every pleasurable event triggers both an increase in dopamine (motivation) and a simultaneous downward deflection known as psychological pain or the urge for repetition. Over time, repeated engagement with a reward diminishes the pleasure response while amplifying this "pain" of craving, which is why addicts chase substances not because they feel good initially but to alleviate the growing discomfort of withdrawal. To counteract this cycle and maintain healthy motivation, Huberman suggests extending the positive phase of an experience cognitively rather than seeking immediate repetition, thereby blunting the subsequent pain response without losing the joy of achievement. The podcast highlights how subjective expectation can powerfully modulate dopamine release through a phenomenon known as placebo effects in cognitive performance. Citing experiments where students believed they were taking Adderall but received only caffeine, Huberman demonstrates that higher-level brain processes can influence basic neurochemistry to enhance focus and working memory simply by altering one's mindset about the task at hand. Furthermore, he introduces phenylethylamine (PEA) as a supplement that releases both dopamine and serotonin at low levels, offering a balanced approach compared to substances like Mucuna pruriens or L-DOPA which might cause excessive spikes in motivation followed by crashes. These insights underscore that while clinical depression requires professional intervention involving pharmacology and therapy, everyday procrastination often stems from an imbalance between the drive for novelty (dopamine) and the capacity for present-moment satisfaction (serotonin). To optimize long-term performance without succumbing to burnout or addiction-like behaviors, Huberman advocates leveraging "intermittent reinforcement," a principle famously utilized in gambling but applicable to healthy goal pursuit. By occasionally removing rewards subjectively—such as giving away money after financial success or avoiding intense celebration for every intermediate milestone—one can prevent the dopamine system from crashing and maintain sustained drive toward long-term objectives like academic goals, athletic feats, or creative endeavors. This strategy involves blunting the reward response at regular intervals to keep the brain's motivation circuits in check while still enjoying milestones. Ultimately, Huberman concludes that a healthy emotional landscape requires balancing these opposing systems: using dopamine for pursuit and anticipation while cultivating serotonin-based contentment through mindfulness practices like focusing on sensory details of an almond or engaging in deep sleep hygiene, ensuring individuals can pursue goals without losing the ability to enjoy life's present moments.
Read the full video transcript
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 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 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, and it's
fundamentally important for people
getting addicted to substances or
behaviors. So, how does this work? Well,
you've got a structure in the deep part
of your brain called the VTA. The VTA or
ventral tegmental area contains neurons
that send what we call axons, little
wires, that spit out dopamine at a
different structure called the nucleus
accumbens. And those two structures, VTA
and nucleus accumbens, form
really the core machinery of the reward
pathway and the pathway that controls
your motivation for anything.
You can think of them like an
accelerator. They bias you for action.
However, within the reward pathway,
there's also a break. The break or
restriction on that dopamine, which
controls when it's released and how much
it's released, is the prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex is the neural real
estate right behind your forehead. You
hear about it for decision-making,
executive function, for planning, etc.
And indeed, it's responsible for a lot
of those. It's this really unique real
estate that we were all endowed with as
humans. Other animals don't have much of
it. We have a lot of it. And that
prefrontal cortex acts as a brake on the
dopamine system. And that brings us
to the important feature of motivation,
which is that motivation is a two-part
process, which is about balancing
pleasure and pain. So, when you're just
sitting around not doing much of
anything, this reward pathway is
releasing dopamine at a rate of about
three or four times per second. It's
kind of firing at a low level. If
suddenly you get excited about
something, you anticipate something,
not receive a reward, but you get
excited in an anticipatory way,
then the rate of firing, the rate of
activity in this reward pathway,
suddenly increases to like 30 or 40
times. And it has the effect of creating
a sense of action or desire to move in
the direction of the thing that you're
craving. In fact, it's fair to say that
dopamine is responsible for wanting and
for craving. And that's distinctly
different from the way that you hear it
talked about normally, which is that
it's involved in pleasure. So, yes,
dopamine is released in response to sex.
It's released in response to food. It's
released in response to a lot of things,
but it's mostly released in anticipation
and craving for a particular thing. It
has the effect of narrowing our focus
for the thing that we crave.
And that thing could be as simple as a
cup of coffee. It could be as um
important as a big board meeting. It
could be a big final exam. It could be
uh the person that we're excited to meet
or see. Dopamine doesn't care about what
you're craving. It just releases at a
particular rate. If we just take a step
back and we look at the scientific data
on
how much the dopamine firing increases
in response to different things, you get
a pretty interesting window into how
your brain works and why you might be
motivated or not motivated. Let's say
you're hungry
or you're looking forward to a cup of
coffee
or you're going to see your partner.
Well, your dopamine neurons are firing
at a low rate until you start thinking
about the thing that you want or the
thing that you're looking forward to.
When you eat that food
the amount of dopamine that's released
in this reward pathway goes up about 50%
above baseline.
Sex, which is fundamental to our species
continuation and reproduction sex does
release dopamine and it increases
dopamine levels about 100% so basically
doubles them.
Nicotine increases the amount of
dopamine about 150% above baseline.
Cocaine and amphetamine increase the
amount of dopamine that's released a
thousandfold within about 10 seconds of
consuming the drug.
However, just thinking about food, about
sex
about nicotine if you like nicotine or
cocaine or amphetamine can increase the
amount of dopamine that's released to
the same degree as actually consuming
the drug. Now, it depends in some cases
for instance the cocaine user or the
addict that wants cocaine can't just
think about cocaine and increase the
amount of that's released about a
thousandfold. It's actually much lower
but it's just enough to put them on the
motivation track for to crave that
particular thing. Now, there are reasons
why you would have brain circuitry like
this. I mean brain circuitry like this
didn't evolve to get you addicted. Brain
circuitry like this
evolved
in order to motivate behaviors toward
particular goals. Water when you're
thirsty, sex in order to reproduce.
These things and these brain areas and
neurons were part of the evolutionary
history that led to the continuation of
our species.
Things like cocaine and amphetamine are
disastrous for most people because they
release so much dopamine and they create
these closed loops where people then
only crave the particular thing, cocaine
and amphetamine, that leads to those
massive amounts of dopamine release.
Most things don't release that that
level of dopamine. Now nowadays there's
a ton of interest in social media and in
video games and it there have been some
measurements of the amount of dopamine
released. Video games, especially video
games that have a very high update speed
where there's novel territory all the
time. Novelty is a big stimulus of
dopamine. Those can release dopamine
somewhere between nicotine and cocaine.
So very high levels of dopamine release.
Social media is an interesting one
because the amount of dopamine that's
released in response to logging on to
social media initially could be quite
high, but it seems like likely that
there's a taper in the amount of
dopamine. But and yet people still get
addicted. So why? Why is it that we can
get addicted to things that fail to get
to elicit the same massive amount of
pleasure that they initially did?
Being addicted to something isn't just
about the fact that it feels so good
that you want to do it over and over
again and that's because of this
pleasure pain balance that underlies
motivation. So let's look a little bit
closer at the pleasure pain balance
because therein lies the tools for you
to be able to control motivation toward
healthy things and avoid motivated
behaviors towards things that are
destructive for you. There are a lot of
reasons why people try novel behaviors,
whether or not those are drugs or
whether or not those are adventure
thrill-seeking things where, you know,
they take a new class. As you'll notice,
I'm not placing any judgment or value on
these different behaviors. Although I
think it's fair to point out that for
most people
addictive drugs like cocaine and
amphetamine are very destructive.
Actually, we know that about 15 to 20%
of people have a genetic bias towards
addiction. That
you know, you sometimes hear that the
first time that you use a drug, you can
become addicted to it. That's actually
not been shown to be true for most
things and most people, but for some
people that actually is true. But, in
any case, the way that addiction works
and the way that motivation works
generally in the non-addictive setting
is that when you anticipate something, a
little bit of dopamine is released. And
then when you reach that thing, you
engage in that thing,
the amount of dopamine goes up even
further. But as you repeatedly pursue a
behavior and you repeatedly engage with
a particular thing, let's say you love
running or you love chocolate. As you
eat a piece of chocolate, believe it or
not, it tastes good. And then there's a
shift away from activation of dopamine
and there are other chemicals that are
released that trigger a low-level sense
of pain. Now, you might not feel this
physical pain, but the craving that you
feel is both one part dopamine and one
part the mirror image of dopamine, which
is the pain or the craving for yet
another piece of chocolate. And this is
a very important and subtle feature of
the dopamine system that's not often
discussed. People always talk about just
as pleasure. You love social media, so
it gives you dopamine and so you engage
in that. You like chocolate, it releases
dopamine, so you do that. But for every
bit of dopamine that's released, there's
another circuit in the brain that
creates you can think of it as kind of
like a downward deflection in pleasure.
So you engage in something you really
want and there's an increase in
pleasure. And then there's a
without
you doing anything, there's a mirror
image of that, which is a downward
deflection in pleasure, which we're
calling pain. So for every bit of
pleasure, there is a mirror image
experience of pain. And they overlap in
time very closely, so it's sometimes
hard to sense this. But try it. The next
time you eat something really delicious,
you'll take a bite, it tastes delicious,
and part of the experience is to want
more of that thing. This is true for any
pleasurable experience.
Now, the diabolical part about dopamine
is that because it didn't evolve in
order to get you to indulge in more and
more and more of something, what happens
is that
initially, you experience an in- an
increase in pleasure, and you also
experience this increase in pain shortly
after or woven in with the pleasure
that makes you want more of that thing.
But, with each subsequent time that you
encounter that thing, the experience of
dopamine release and pleasure is
diminished a little bit.
And the diabolical thing is that the
pain response is increased a little bit.
And this is best observed in the context
of drug-seeking behavior. The first time
someone decides to take cocaine or
amphetamine, they will experience a huge
dopamine release, and they will feel
likely very good.
However, the next time they take it, it
won't feel quite as good. And it won't
feel even as good the third time or the
next time.
But,
the amount of pain, the amount of
craving that they experience for the
drug will increase over time. So, much
of our pursuit of pleasure is simply to
reduce the pain of craving. So, the next
time you experience something you really
like, I don't want to take you out of
that experience, but it's really
important that you notice this. That if
there's something you really enjoy, part
of that enjoyment is about the
anticipation and wanting of more of that
thing.
And that's the pain system in action.
And so, we can distinguish between
dopamine, which is really about
pleasure, and dopamine, which is really
about motivation to pursue more in order
to relieve or exclude future pain. Let
me repeat that. Dopamine isn't as much
about pleasure as much as it is about
motivation and desire to pursue more in
order to reduce the amount of pain.
And we are now talking about pain as a
psychological pain and a craving,
although people that miss a lover very
badly or that really crave a food very
badly or that are addicted to a drug and
can't access it will experience that as
a physical craving and a mental craving.
The body and brain are linked in this
way. It's almost they'll describe it as
painful. They yearn for it. And I think
the word yearning is one that's very
valuable in this context because
yearning seems to include a whole body
experience more than just wanting, which
could just be up in the mind. So, your
desire for something is proportional to
how
pleasurable it is to indulge in that
thing, but also how much pain you
experience when you don't have it. And
you can now start to let your mind
wander into all sorts of examples of
addictions or things that you happen to
like. Um I'll use the example that I
sometimes use on here, which is my love
of croissants. The taste of that
croissant makes me want to eat more
croissants. Now, eventually blood sugar
goes up, satiety is reached, etc. What
happens then? What is satisfaction and
satiety about? Well, that's a separate
neuromodulator. That's about the
neuromodulator serotonin. It's about
oxytocin. It's about a hormone system
that involves something called
prolactin. So, we're going to talk about
all all of those in the book The
Molecule of More, wonderful book. Uh
those were described as the here and now
molecules, the ones that allow you to
experience your sensations and pleasure
in the present and for which the brain
stops projecting into the future. So,
now let's talk about craving and and
these so-called here and now molecules
and how those engage in a kind of
push-pull balance that will allow you to
not just feel more motivated, but also
to enjoy the things in life that you are
pursuing to a much greater degree. We
have neurons in an area of our brain
called the raphe, r a p h e. The raphe
releases serotonin at different places
in the brain. Serotonin is the molecule
of bliss and contentment for what you
already have.
I've talked before about exteroception.
Exteroception is a focus on the outside
world, everything beyond the confines of
your skin.
I've also talked about interoception, a
focus on things that are happening
internally within the confines of your
skin.
Dopamine
and serotonin
can be thought of as related to
exteroception. Dopamine makes us focused
on things outside us that are beyond
what we call our personal space, where
we actually have to move and take action
in order to achieve things. And
serotonin in general has to do with the
things that are in our immediate here
and now, hence the description of these
as the here and now molecules.
So, it's interesting to point out that
the body and the brain can direct its
attention towards things outside us or
inside us or split our attention between
those.
Just understand that dopamine biases us
toward thinking about what we don't
have, whereas serotonin and some of the
related molecules, like the
endocannabinoids,
if you picked up on the word
cannabinoid, yes, it's like cannabis
because cannabis
attaches to endocannabinoid receptors,
and the endocannabinoids are receptors
that and chemicals that the cannabinoids
that you naturally make that are
involved in things like forgetting. But
you make these molecules that bind to
these receptors that make you feel kind
of blissed out and content in the
present. So, you got these two systems.
They're kind of like a push-pull. And if
you were to say do the um you know, in
the book uh Wherever You Go, There You
Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn talks about this um
meditation practice that's different
than most meditation practices where you
eat one almond and you focus all of your
attention on the almond, the taste of
the almond, the texture of the almond.
That's really a mindfulness practice
that's geared towards trying to take a
behavior, which is normally about
pursuit, normally feeding is we're going
engaging in feeding because of dopamine,
we pursue more of a food because of that
pleasure-pain relationship I talked
about before. The focus on the one
almond or the or becoming very present
in any behavior that normally would be a
kind of exteroceptive pursuit behavior
and bring it into the here and now,
that's a mental
trick or a mental task that the
mindfulness community has really
embraced in order to try and create
increased pleasure for what you already
have. It's really trying to accomplish a
shift from dopamine being released to
serotonin and the cannabinoid system
being involved in that behavior.
Dopamine has the quality of making
people kind of rapidly in pursuit of
things. Drugs like marijuana,
the opioids,
anything that um really hits the
serotonin system hard tend to make
people rather lethargic and content to
stay exactly where they are. They don't
want to pursue much at all. So, you've
got these molecules like dopamine that
make you focused on the things you want
and the things you crave. And then
you've got the molecules that make you
content with what you have. So, the most
important thing perhaps in creating a
healthy emotional landscape is to have a
balance between these two neuromodulator
systems. So, at about this point in the
podcast, I'm guessing that some of you
are thinking, "Okay, great. I want more
dopamine. I want to be more motivated. I
don't want to procrastinate as much. And
I want to be able to experience life. I
want these here-and-now molecules to be
released as well." Well, there is a way
to do that, but you have to understand
the source of procrastination is not one
thing. There are basically two kinds of
procrastinators, or so says the
research. The first kind are people that
actually really enjoy the
stress of the impending deadline. It's
the only way they can get into action.
There are other procrastinators for
which they simply are not releasing
enough dopamine. For those people, there
are a variety of things that can
increase dopamine. I do suggest you talk
to a psychiatrist or doctor. I've talked
about Mucuna pruriens, which is 99.9%
L-DOPA, the precursor to dopamine.
There are antidepressants like
Wellbutrin.
Bupropion is the other name for it,
which increase dopamine and epinephrine.
However, if you think back to our
earlier discussion about dopamine,
dopamine, if it's very high,
creates a sense of pleasure and the
desire for more. So, you can also become
a person for which
enough is never enough. The only thing
that dopamine really wants is more of
the thing that releases dopamine. And
so, one of the things that you can do in
order to generally just be a happier
person, especially if you're a person in
pursuit of long-term goals of any kind,
is the longer that you can
extend that positive phase of the
dopamine release, and the more that you
can blunt the pain response to that, the
better. And you can actually do this
cognitively. I I used to joke with my
lab that when we'd publish a paper, I
would get really excited, but I wouldn't
allow myself to get too excited. What I
wanted to do instead, and what I've
still tried to do, is try and extend the
arc of that positive experience as long
as I possibly can. Simply by thinking
back, like, "Oh, that was really cool. I
really enjoyed doing that work. I really
enjoyed the discovery. I really enjoyed
doing that with the people that I was
working with at the time. What a
pleasure that was." So, you can extend
pleasure without having to engage in the
behavior over and over. That's extending
the arc of that dopamine release. As
well, it offsets some of the pain of not
having that experience
occur over and over and over again. Now,
for the high performers out there,
you're probably familiar with this. Many
people who have a big achievement, their
first thoughts are, "Well, now what?
What am I going to do next? How am I
ever going to exceed that?" And indeed,
many people who are very high on this
kind of dopamine sensation and
novelty-seeking scale
uh uh are prone to addiction. They're
prone to the rapid pursuit of external
goals, of exteroception, to the neglect
of these internal mechanisms that allow
them to feel calm and happy. So, for
people that are very driven, very
motivated,
adopting a practice of being able to
engage in the here and now, the sort of
almond type practices we talked about
earlier,
um of learning how to achieve a really
good night's sleep on a regular basis
through tools and mechanisms I talked
about in previous podcasts, gives us
sort of balance to the pleasure-seeking
and offsetting of pain and the pleasure
in the here and now. So, pleasure is
really two things. It's a joy in
pursuit,
but it's also the joy in what you have.
The cool thing is, you can actually
regulate this whole system in a way that
will steer you or lean you towards more
positive anticipation of things in life
and less disappointment. It's simply a
matter of adjusting what we call the
dopamine schedule. In order to
understand how to control the dopamine
system, how to leverage it for a better
life,
you need to understand the results of a
very important experiment.
This experiment was able to separate
pleasure from motivation. It's a very
simple, but like many simple
experiments, a very elegant experiment.
What they did, and this has now been
done in animals and in humans,
they offered rats food.
It was a food that they particularly
liked.
And the animals would lever press for a
pellet of food, kind of classic
experiment. They'd eat the food, and
they presumably liked the food because
they were motivated to press the lever
and eat it. Great.
They took other rats.
They eliminated the dopamine neurons.
You can do this by injection of a
neurotoxin that destroys these neurons.
So, they actually had no dopamine in
their brain. They have no ability to
release dopamine.
And they gave them a lever.
The rats would sit there and they'd hit
the lever and they'd eat the food. They
still enjoyed the food.
So you say, well, okay, so dopamine
isn't involved in motivation and isn't
involved in pleasure? No, it absolutely
is. They could still enjoy the food, but
if they moved the rat literally one body
length away from the lever,
what they found was the animals that had
dopamine would move over to the lever,
press it, and eat. And the ones the rats
that did not have dopamine available to
them,
wouldn't even move one body length, one
rat length, to the lever in order to
press it and get the food. Dopamine,
therefore, is not about the ability to
experience pleasure. It is about
motivation for pleasure. And so many of
you are probably thinking, wow, I'm not
a very motivated person. Like you talked
about the one kind of procrastination
earlier, what about when I just feel
kind of meh about life. Now, it for some
of you there may be a real clinical
depression and you should talk to a
professional. There are very good
prescription drugs that can really help
people. There's also great non-drug
treatments of uh psychotherapy and other
treatments that are being developed in
addition to psychotherapy and the
various kinds of psychoanalysis, etc.,
that one can use. I think the data
really point to the fact that a
combination of pharmacology and talk
therapies are generally best, and there
are a huge range of these things. I know
many of you are in these professions, so
we're not going to talk about that right
now. There is a compound that's kind of
interesting in the supplement space that
isn't um Mucuna pruriens L-dopa, it's
not L-tyrosine,
that isn't
promoting massive releases of dopamine
or even dopamine alone, but a
combination of dopamine and serotonin.
And it's an intriguing molecule. It's um
sold over the counter. Again, you have
to check with your healthcare um uh
provider before you would take anything
or remove anything, that's very
important. But it's phenylethylamine,
or PEA.
PEA
or beta phenylethylamine
releases
dopamine at low levels, but also
serotonin at low levels. So, it's kind
of a cocktail of the motivation
molecules as well as the {quote} here
and now molecules.
And people's response to this varies
widely.
But, many people report feeling
heightened sense of mental acuity,
well-being, etc. It is a bit of a
stimulant like anything that triggers
activation of the dopamine and
norepinephrine pathway. But, it is an
interesting supplement. So, now let's
talk about what is a dopamine schedule
and how you can leverage this in order
to have heightened levels of motivation,
but not get so much dopamine that you're
experiencing a crash afterwards. And
also, so that you can experience
heightened pleasure from the various
pursuits that you are engaged in in
life. And here's the key principle.
Dopamine is very subjective. Meaning,
you can either allow yourself to
experience the pleasure of reaching a
milestone, of achieving or some craving
or not. It's actually pretty powerful
what one can do with the subjective
system. In fact, I'm going to describe
you an experiment that highlights just
how powerful the subjective readout or
the subjective interpretation of a given
experience really can be even at the
level of pharmacology. And the title of
the experiment is expectation for
stimulant type modifies caffeine's
effects on mood and cognition. This was
done in college students. It's a
fascinating study. What they did is they
gave
college students
either
placebo
essentially nothing or 200 mg of
caffeine. 200 mg of caffeine is about
what's in a typical coffee, like a
medium coffee that you would buy, a drip
coffee. So, they took 65 undergraduate
students
in college. They randomized them to
either placebo or caffeine.
And they told them that they were either
getting caffeine or Adderall.
Now, Adderall cognitively carries a very
different
expectation. College students know
Adderall to be a much stronger stimulant
than caffeine. They know it to create a
sort of high. This is the way the
students described it. And they thought
that it would increase their level of
focus and their ability to perform work.
So, what's really interesting is there
was
definitely an effect of placebo versus
caffeine. That's not surprising,
however, right? You take a placebo,
you may or may not feel more alert.
But, you take 200 mg of caffeine, very
likely you're going to feel very alert.
But, there was also an effect of whether
or not the students thought they were
getting caffeine or Adderall. The
subjects receiving caffeine reported
feeling more stimulated, anxious, and
motivated than the subjects that
received the placebo. Okay. But, the
ones that expected Adderall reported
stronger amphetamine effects. They
performed better on a working memory
test. And in general, they had all the
increased cognitive effects that would
have been seen with Adderall, but they
were only ingesting caffeine.
So, it led to heightened performance
simply because the students thought they
were getting Adderall.
And I think this is very important
because I think that it points to the
fact that the the the top-down, the kind
of higher-level cognitive processes are
impacting even the most basic
fundamental aspects of say dopamine
release or our
adrenaline release or epinephrine
release in ways that can positively
impact performance. In this case, it was
a positive improvement in working memory
and focus. So, today we've talked a lot
about the dopamine system and and those
kinds of schedules that will allow
craving or addiction.
What's the schedule of dopamine that's
going to allow you to maximize on your
pursuit of pleasure and your elimination
of pain? And we get the answer to that
from
our good friend gambling.
The reason gambling works, the reason
why people will throw their lives away,
the reason why people go back again and
again and again to places like Las Vegas
and Atlantic City
is because of the hope and anticipation.
It's a Those are cities and places built
on dopamine. They are leveraging your
dopamine system. And as a friend of mine
who's a certified addiction treatment
specialist tells me that, you know, the
gambling addiction is a particularly
sinister because the next time really
could be the thing that changes
everything. Unlike other addictions, the
next time really could change
everything, and that's embedded in the
mind of the gambling addict. And rarely
does it work out uh in favor of the
well-being of the gambling addict and
their family.
However, the intermittent reinforcement
schedule was discovered long ago by
scientific researchers. So, this is the
slot machine that every once in a while
gives you a win to keep you playing.
This is the
the probability of winning on the craps
table or the roulette table or blackjack
just often enough that you're willing to
buy tickets, head out there, play again,
go downstairs again from your room, even
though you swore you were done for the
night. Intermittent reinforcement is the
most powerful form of dopamine reward
schedule to keep you doing something.
So, we can export that. We can use it
for good.
If there's something that you're
pursuing in life, whether or not it's an
academic goal or a financial goal or
relationship goal,
one of the things that you can do to
ensure that you will remain on the path
to that goal for a very long time and
that you will continue to exceed your
previous performance,
as well as continue to enjoy the
dopamine release that occurs when you
hit the milestones that you want to
achieve,
is to occasionally remove rewards
subjectively.
Let's say you set out a goal of making
I'm I'm to make this quantitative with
respect to finances cuz it just is easy
description, but this could also be in
sport, this could be in school, this
could be in music, could be in anything
creative endeavors. But let's say you
set out a certain financial goal, or
let's say you want to get certain number
of followers on whatever social media
platform.
As you reach each one of those goals,
you should know now that the amount of
dopamine is not going to peak, it's
actually going to diminish and make you
crave more. The key to avoiding that
crash, but to still keep it in healthy
levels that will allow you to continue
your your suit, is as you are
staircasing toward your goal, you
actually want to blunt the reward
response for some of those intermediate
goals.
I'm not telling you you shouldn't
celebrate your wins, but I'm telling you
not to celebrate all of them. Whereas a
good friend of mine who recently
fortunately for him
had a great financial success, he asked
me and somebody else, a good friend of
mine who's very tuned into dopamine
reward schedules, understands how they
work at a really deep level, and he
said, "I don't know what to do next."
And we said, "Oh, well, that's simple.
You should just give most of it away."
And this wasn't a ploy to receive any of
the money ourselves, this was really
about reducing the impact of that
reward. Now, hopefully giving your money
away if you already have enough of it
would be something that was rewarding in
and of itself. But if you're a student
who's pursuing goals in university, or
you're an athlete who's pursuing goals,
it actually makes sense from a rational
perspective, once you understand these
mechanisms,
to
hit a new high point of performance,
or to get that A+ or for you if it's an
A- etc., and to tell yourself, "Okay,
that was good." But to actually actively
blunt the reward, to not go and
celebrate too intensely. Because in
doing that, you keep your dopamine
system in check, and you ensure that
you're going to stay on the path of
continued pursuit, not just for that
thing, but for all things. Big increases
in dopamine lead to big crashes in
dopamine and big increases in dopamine
up the ante. So, you can lift the
uh what Las Vegas and Atlantic City and
other gambling
uh
mechanisms and places have known for a
long time. They lifted it from the
scientists. You can now take it back and
you can start to leverage that and you
just make it intermittent. You reward
yourself not on a predictable schedule.
So, not every other time or every third
time or every 10th time, but sometimes
it's three in a row then not at all for
10 days. So,
reward is important, self-reward is
critically important, but make sure that
you're not doing it on such a
predictable schedule that you burn out
these dopamine circuits or that you
undercut your own ability to strive and
achieve. Hopefully, you now know far
more about the dopamine system, reward,
and motivation than you did at the
beginning of this podcast.
Hopefully, you also understand the other
side of dopamine and reward, which is
pain and the balance of this
pleasure-pain system, as well as the
molecules that we call or that were
described in the molecule of more book,
I should say, as the here and now
molecules, things like serotonin and the
endocannabinoids. Finally, I want to
thank you for your time and attention
today. I hope you learned a lot and that
you learned a lot of possible tools that
you could incorporate into your life as
it relates to motivation and emotions.
Thank you for your interest in science.