How Dopamine Works
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. The three amigos back together again after some massively triumphant live shows. Yeah. We did our little Northeast spring swing. Yeah. And it was great. It was a good show. Which one?

The podcast topic that we did live. Oh, I got you. That we're doing all year. I got you. It was pretty good. I love that topic. That's what you call an on-sequitur. But it does feel good to be back, doesn't it? Back in the studio, back doing what we're born to do. I kind of prefer on stage, but sure, this is great too. Do you? You like the thrill of the audience, the roar of the crowd, that bull running at you? Yeah, maybe. Nice.

I like it too sometimes when I'm not totally terrified because I drank too much energy drinks. Well, I wonder if your dopamine receptors are functioning as they should. Yeah, that's a great question, Chuck. And it's a wonderful segue too because it just so happens that today the topic of this episode is dopamine. And there's probably no more misunderstood topic.

neurochemical, certainly neurochemical, maybe substance in your body at all than dopamine. We used to think we had a really great handle on dopamine and what it does and how it works and

It turns out that we are at every turn a new study comes along that says, nope, we're wrong. Yeah, 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 website.

has some articles, you'll see this old, antiquated, outdated view of what dopamine is being kind of paraded around.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. 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 it, 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 the thrill of, you know, those people that walk around on ledges and stuff. Ledge walkers. Yeah, ledge walkers. Yeah.

But it does all kinds of things. That's just where it makes the newspaper headlines. But we should probably talk a little bit about just the neurotransmitter cycle that it goes through. Sure.

So the whole thing starts. It turns out that dopamine is used throughout the body, but for the most part, it's used in the brain. The problem is, is if you like had a big handful of dopamine and you just shoved it in your mouth, it couldn't make it into your brain for use.

It can't cross the blood-brain barrier, in other words. Fortunately, the thing that makes dopamine up, its essential ingredient, tyrosine, an amino acid, can cross the blood-brain barrier. And when it gets there, it gets a big fat hug from something called tyrosine hydroxylase. And that converts it into dopamine. And all of a sudden, your brain's like, yes, let's go. That's right.

And we've known about it a long time. It's been around a long time. It is not exclusive to human beings. No, that's a big one. Yeah, it's in all kinds of animals. But we are really kind of great at making it. And I was about to say hooked on it, but that implies the whole addiction thing. And I don't want to go down that road. But humans love this stuff. And we produce about three times as much as other primates do. Yeah.

Yes. And in fact, Emily Deans wrote an article in 2011, I think on psychology today. She's an evolutionary psychiatrist. And she said that dopamine is what made humans so successful. And from what I can tell, the latest research about dopamine is that it essentially is what allows us to learn about the world around us.

We make connections that collectively form our mental map of the world, of how we're to behave around other people, of how we do things like go get food, like that dopamine is somehow behind all of it. And that because we're so responsive to dopamine and we produce so much dopamine compared to other animals in the animal kingdom, that is conceivably what has allowed us to become

as successful as we are compared to other animals. Isn't that nuts? Like it could all just come down to dopamine essentially. Yeah. And 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'd be more current, right? I don't play pickleball. I haven't tried it yet. I want to, though. Okay. Well, there's plenty of places and people to play it with. Yet I have found no one or no place. Oh. I'm sure somebody will write in and offer to play with you. Of course. Then I go out there and I, like, blow my ACL or something. Oh, God. That was nice.

So at the highest level, you know, we kind of talked about this a thousand times before, but dopamine functions as a neurotransmitter. It enables signals to pass through these gaps, these synapses, and make connection from neuron to neuron. And that's just sort of the bird's eye view, but

There are all kinds of things that dopamine does, and depending what kinds of neurons it's talking to and it's introducing to one another, it's going to have different effects on the human body.

Yes. So there's D1 to D5, I think, types of receptors, dopamine receptors, and four pathways that they follow. And like you said, depending on what receptor is being activated and what pathway is being followed, all sorts of different stuff can happen. Dopamine is associated with motor control, learning, memory, malfunctions in it can result in psychosis,

They use dopamine as a vasostimulant to treat heart conditions. It has just a cluster of different effects on the body depending on where it's being processed, like what pathway it's being processed. Right. And I think there's four of them total. Did you want to talk about that? I feel like we should.

Okay. The first one is the nigrostriatal tract. Nice. You mentioned motor control first, and that's the tract that has to do with motor control. Yeah. So if those aren't working correctly, the dopamine neurons or the dopaminergic pathway in the nigrostriatal tract, that can result in Parkinson's. It's very famously associated with dopamine for anybody who has read Awakenings or saw the movie.

Yeah. Which we'll probably talk about a little bit more later. That movie? Yeah.

I got a great, great bit up my sleeve. Okay. The second pathway is the mesocortical pathway. That has a lot to do with executive functioning, prioritizing stuff, how your brain plans things, how it files away stuff, and how it organizes your overall sort of priorities. Yes. And now it's time to talk about the most random dopaminergic pathway of all.

The tubero-infundibular pathway. Tubero-infundibular. Yeah. 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. And if you block that pathway, the milk production begins. Isn't that interesting? Yeah.

Yeah, we talked about that in the two-parter, the old breastfeeding two-parter. Oh, we did? Oh, yeah. Oh, I don't remember that. Yeah, yeah. Wow, you've got a great memory. And that's where it all begins.

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 where – this is the one that gets all the press because this is the one that has to deal with addiction.

Pleasure. And we're going to talk a lot about reward and how reward factors into how dopamine works. Right. This is the reason why some people get the chemical drawing of the molecular drawing of dopamine, like tattooed on their wrist because they're so hedonic and into pleasure. That's why you might see somebody with that because of that pathway. Right.

I never heard of that. Yeah, it's a thing. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a misinterpretation, but it is a thing that people do sometimes. Sure. So, you know, we talked about misunderstandings about dopamine. And up until not too long ago, we didn't know a lot about exactly how dopamine worked in the body. And there was a misguided thought that there was something called volume transmission at work, which was...

you just sort of, well, you don't flood. We'll talk about, you know, artificially flooding dopamine, which is also a problem that resulted from this misnomer. But dopamine just went very slowly. It was not very specific at all. Just kind of washed over the brain. And if it made some connections with various neurons, then that was kind of the dumb luck of dopamine because dopamine is just dopey. Right. Here's a great example of just how wrong we got dopamine. Right.

It turns out the process that dopamine is excreted and crosses into the synapse and creates like an electrical transmission in the brain is the exact opposite of volume transmission. It could not be more opposite than the idea that it just floods slowly across the brain and whatever it runs into, it runs into. We found that in milliseconds, a process

precise squirt of dopamine hits exactly the right neuron in exactly the right places, right on the money. That's how dopamine is excreted. The exact opposite of volume transmission. Yeah. And we learned that not too long ago, 2018 medical researchers at Harvard

Released this paper and said, hey, guess what? Everyone is the opposite of everything you've been saying. And everyone went, oh, OK. 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 homo vanillic acid. Right. Right.

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? It's gross. It is gross. Yeah.

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. Thank you.

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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.

That's 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 the 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 use 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. Right. Or give me more meth. Sure.

So this whole thing, this changed our understanding, at least in academia, among people who study this kind of thing. We realized we were misinterpreting what we were seeing and that a lack of dopamine didn't lead to a lack of pleasure called anhedonia. It was a lack of motivation to seek out that pleasure. That's the effect of not having enough dopamine that we found from those rat tests.

So like this whole new framework of understanding it kind of came along because to be clear, dopamine is very much associated with things that give us pleasure. And it does seem like the more pleasurable something is, the more dopamine gets released.

Like, for example, I think I saw like eating something that tastes really good increases your dopamine levels by 100 percent sometimes. Yeah. But cocaine increases your dopamine levels 10 times that. Yeah. So the more intense the pleasurable experiences, the more dopamine gets released. So it's definitely associated with it.

What they found is like the dopamine is not making you feel pleasure. There's something else involved. It's just it's never caught with the smoking gun, but it's always there when the dead body is found. And it has this mysterious smile on its face because it knows you can't prove anything. Yeah. Well, it's liking versus wanting. And that's a theory of reward behavior where likings.

Liking is that pleasure, that hit you get right when you put that bite of peanut butter pie in your mouth is that pleasure. Wanting is the motivation to earn the reward that you get out of having that peanut butter pie. Like, 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'd 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. 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, but

Um, there's one theory called a, uh, that it's prediction error. So you get, you get more bang for your buck. Basically. Um, you, 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 were 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. Uh,

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.

which is what happened to Robert De Niro's character. Remember, as a boy, he caught this thing and then he just kind of froze in place. It's where you develop Parkinson's symptoms so much that you just don't, you can't move. You don't, you're, you're, you cannot move. You have, you don't have the required strength

dopamine to actually move. So you're just sitting there frozen in place like a statue. But anybody who saw this movie remembers being amazed by this scene. If a certain patient is stimulated, their dopamine is stimulated by

Yeah.

Or there's another patient that was on the beach, I believe in their wheelchair, saw someone drowning and was motivated to get up and go save the person and then come back and go back to this frozen statue kind of stasis. Great scene. It is. So like that has to do with the motivational aspect of dopamine and that given the right stimulus –

Even something that tremendous as just a crazy amount of Parkinson's symptoms can be overcome or overwhelmed by that dopamine hit. Yeah, absolutely. And then jumping back to that first one, the prediction error, they've done research on people who gamble, who play cards and play the slot machines and stuff, and their brains experience

about the same amount of dopamine activity when they almost win, like you got the big pot in the middle of the table, you're playing poker and you lose at the last second, your dopamine level will be about the same as if you had actually won it. Yes. Which is pretty remarkable. And then I think it kind of qualifies as a third interpretation. The most current study I've seen

Seize dopamine is essentially the thing that allows us to learn. If you connect one thing to another, it's because dopamine changes.

had you make that connection. 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 I'm

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 necessarily.

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 times, certainly in our addiction podcast episodes. But it does play a pretty big role in drug abuse and addiction. It does reinforce the –

you know, the, the idea that you want to keep using those drugs because it's making you feel good. And when we're talking about, you know, you're talking about the, uh, the woman juggling oranges in that movie and how remarkable that is, right? If they've given you Parkinson's drugs and they just flood your brain with dopamine, they found that 10% of the people that have had that treatment, um,

Turn into gambling addicts. And I would imagine there are people who who already gambled. I don't think it like drove them to start gambling, but that just goes to show you the power of like what a flood of dopamine will do to your brain. And it's it's pretty it's pretty clunky way to to deal with it, I think.

Yeah, I think that's what you were referring to earlier when you were saying like that understanding of volume transmission theory of dopamine release. That's what the drugs are based on, that understanding or that misunderstanding. And like, yeah, that's what happens. It's like, yes, if it does crawl across the brain and runs into whatever neurons that it can trigger, it's going to have all sorts of other knock-on effects. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

So I guess our current understanding of how dopamine relates to addiction is that it connects drugs with pleasure. And as I was saying before, the more intense the experience, especially the reward, you can have a negative experience. And I think they're starting to figure out dopamine has something to do with that too. But as far as we know, dopamine

The more intense the reward, the greater the flood of dopamine. And so the greater, the stronger the connection you make between, you know, pressing a lever and a scientist giving you a bunch of meth. Yeah, absolutely. But that is, to be clear, just part of the recipe of what leads to addiction. I don't.

Maybe there are people out there saying that, but I don't know if anyone really is saying like it's all because of dopamine. No. It is part of the recipe in addition, obviously, to your genetics. Just the fact that drugs are out there and available and their environmental pressures and influences. All kinds of reasons that people start to take drugs or continue to take drugs. And as far as the continuation, dopamine is essential.

is definitely a part of it. Right. And so one of the ways that you learn to take drugs is not just from the fact that your brain is flooded with dopamine, which allows you to make that connection very strongly, but

But the brain actually changes in response to those increased floods of dopamine because it's not set up to release dopamine like that repeatedly over long periods of time. It can do it once in a while. Yeah. But you can't really do it too often because then the brain responds by shutting down dopamine receptors. Right.

The problem is, is that this means that you have to do more drugs to get that sensation, as far as you know. And that's what creates the cycle of addiction. That, to me, smells vaguely of being almost out of date. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. But it does make sense, then, that the ideal drug would trigger a maximum release of feel-good chemicals.

But a minimum release of dopamine. If anybody could ever come up with a drug like that, people would be able to do drugs all the time. They'd never get addicted. Sure. But they have other negative effects on the body. Sure, sure. Can't forget about that.

Yeah, yeah. The other bad thing, obviously, if you're going to do the amount of drugs it takes to shut down your dopamine receptors because your body's like, wait, wait, wait, this isn't right. Let me shut this down. It's not just shutting down the dopamine receptor that makes you want to do more cocaine or whatever. It's just shutting your dopamine receptors down. So you mentioned it earlier, anhedonia, that's the idea that you don't receive pleasure from any activity. Yeah.

And if all of a sudden your dopamine has been shut down such because you've been doing drugs that you're not getting any kind of pleasant, feel good stimulation from life, then that could be another reason that you up your desire to do drugs. Yeah. And then there's one other factor involved that with fewer dopamine receptor sites, you

Remember you said that one of those dopaminergic pathways is related to executive function like impulse control, responsibility, that kind of stuff? Well, with lower levels of dopamine, the theory goes that you are more likely to engage in reckless behavior to get drugs. You might do things that you normally wouldn't do, not because you're just this addict who has to have it, but because

partially also because you don't have the impulse control that you did before you became addicted to drugs and your dopamine receptors started shutting down. Yeah, and I think that's, I mean, we talked about it in the addiction app. It's not just the effect that the drug has on your body, the negative effects that it physiologically has on your body, but the behaviors that you start engaging in when you're under the influence of drugs and want more drugs and maybe can't find the drugs, that's

Maybe almost worse than the physiological ramifications, you know? Oh, yeah, for sure. And it also ties in with risk-taking because dopamine is connected to risk-taking. And, in fact, they found that some people seem to be biologically, physiologically predisposed to risk-taking based on their dopamine levels. And, in fact, they find that they have fewer what are called autoreceptors.

Apparently, over time, we've evolved to create on dopamine neural cells a site called an autoreceptor that actually catches some of the dopamine. It helps regulate it like it never makes it out.

out. So it keeps the amount of dopamine down to a regulated level. So the fewer autoreceptors you have, if you're still pumping out dopamine, you get a much greater impact from that dopamine. And they have correlated that to risk-taking. People who have fewer dopaminergic autoreceptors take more risks, at least according to some studies. Yeah. And they've also done studies where

They found that that risk should or needs to be tied to a reward, like a gain, basically. There was a study from the University of College of

In London in 2015, it said subjects whose dopamine levels was higher, it was boosted artificially with medication, would choose risky options more often if it involved a potential gain. They didn't see that same thing going on if there was a potential loss involved. So there's definitely a tie to a gain or another way of saying that would be a reward. Yes.

And then also that impulse control is also a huge hallmark of ADHD symptoms. And so ADHD is very commonly associated with some sort of dopamine deficiency. And from what I've seen, there isn't an across-the-board, we haven't discovered some across-the-board type of brain that's like, yep, if you have this brain, you have ADHD and vice versa. Right.

And we're not even certain exactly what effect the dopamine is having. We're almost just kind of like seeing effects, right?

that are the behavior of people with ADHD and saying, hey, we know that dopamine does that. Or if you don't have dopamine, you're more likely to do this. So there's this correlation. It's just not... It's never been like completely shown yet. I think it probably will be at some time, but we don't really know how ADHD is linked to dopamine. But there's... We're almost certain that dopamine drives at least some of the ADHD symptoms. It's just...

Because of that, people have made leaps in understanding. Like there's a longstanding myth about people with ADHD that they do these impulsive behaviors

to get a hit of dopamine. Well, that's based on that old idea that dopamine is a pleasure-producing chemical or a reward-producing chemical, where instead it might be that people do these behaviors that are impulsive because they don't have the dopamine that can regulate their impulses, and so they have less impulse control. We're just still sorting it out, I guess. Yeah. All right, should we take our final break here? Yeah.

All right, we'll take a break and we'll talk about, oh boy, it's going to be so much fun, social media right after this. Hi, icons. It's Paris Hilton. Check out my new single, Chasin', featuring Meghan Trainor. Out today. Hi.

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All right, so we're back, and we promised talk of social media because I think everyone is pretty hip to the fact now that notifications and the dings and the likes and the loves and the hearts –

And all the things that come through various interacting with various social media platforms. He just sounded so old, dude. I know. That's great. In this case, I love being old. I don't want any of it. I'm with you. But in any case, all of that stuff combines to give you a hit of dopamine. And it's specific. And you're like, fine, that's great, whatever. But it's specifically structured and built that way and coded that way.

So that you will become addicted to that social media platform. And they have admitted as such in 2018. It was it was a big news item when they were I don't know, it was like congressional testimony or something. Can't remember exactly, but there was a VP at Facebook who came out and was basically like, hey, this is a.

Yeah.

Yeah, and that strategy was based on – this was Chamath Palihapitiya, who was a VP of user development at Facebook. And they said that this was based on short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops. And, you know, this is all old news to us now. I mean, this was six years ago. Think about how much our understanding of what social media does to us. But in 2018, that was a groundbreaking admission. But it's true. And, I mean, that's essentially –

how social media works. Like you get the app and you start to realize that if that little badge number comes up and says, hey, you have like two notifications, you go into it, you're going to get some sort of reward of some sort. You're going to, like you said, get a ding or a like or a heart or something like that. And that is a reward to you. And so based on the mesolimbic theory of dopamine, basically,

we get a dopamine hit and so we learn to come back. And apparently also randomness has a lot to do with it because as we start to be able to predict when we'll get a reward, that dopamine stops being a part of that whole experience. So if it can be done randomly, we don't know when we're going to get a reward. It has a maximum effect of releasing dopamine and thus teaching us to go back to social media over and over and over again.

Yeah, totally. There's also this psychiatrist named Dr. Cameron, S-E-P-A-H, I guess, SEPA? Mm-hmm. Is that how you'd say it? SEPA or SEPA? Okay. One of those three. Mm-hmm. Who came out and said, all right, but...

There's this term that I'm going to float out there, and it's called a dopamine fast. And the idea when that was floated was people heard that and they said, oh, well, dopamine just means just it's just a catch all term basically for for any sort of addictive behavior like reinforcement. And you can go on a dopamine fast and like, you know, put that down.

Put that social media app down for a couple of weeks. And when you come back, it's just like your brain's going to have a little rest from that thing. And you're going to feel amazing about how much you love it when you come back. And that's not at all what Dr. Cameron was talking about or meant. No. Dr. Sipa Sepa was basically saying like this.

Like he really misused dopamine fast and even said to the New York Times, like, I didn't mean it like that. Don't don't take it like that. I don't mean it literally. Everybody said too late.

We're going to take it literally. And so there was this movement, I think people still do it, of self-denial of everything from like people stopped interacting with other people. People stopped eating foods they found pleasurable. They stopped talking if they didn't need to. Anything that could conceivably give you a release of dopamine.

And their premise was that if they did that, it would be like going and drying out on heroin or cocaine so that when you come back, that first experience again with heroin or cocaine is that much more amazing because you've kind of replenished your endocannabinoids and opioids and all that stuff. Dopamine does not work like that. If you stop...

flooding your brain with dopamine, it doesn't replenish. It doesn't need to replenish. That's not how it works. But that's what people were doing. They just completely misinterpreted it. And it was based on faulty science and Dr. Sipa essentially using the wrong term. Yeah, I think the idea that he was talking about was, hey, put that stuff down and

go do other things that you find pleasure in. Right. Live in the world or go out in nature or, you know, kind of get a hold of your life again so you don't feel like you're, you know, tied to this social media app for your happiness. Yeah. Our,

Our moms used to call it going to play outside for a while. Right. Or summer, I think, is another term it used to be called. Yeah. But instead, this guy called it a dopamine fast, and people really took a left turn with it. So he identified six compulsive behaviors or categories that he was saying you could really do good for yourself by taking a dopamine fast or a break from emotional eating, it

excessive internet usage and gaming, gambling and shopping, porn and masturbation, thrill and novelty seeking, which I took to mean taking a break from thrill kill murder sprees and recreational drugs. But he also said, you know, anything that you feel like has got a hold on your life,

If you just stop and step away from it, it will have less a whole of your life. So TV would definitely be in there probably for a lot of people. But if you step back and look at what this guy's talking about, it's the most basic thing that people have been doing for eons. And yet just by slapping TV,

dopamine fast on it, it became sticky and buzzy and brainstormy or java stormy and like super corporate. And people just really got into it and started thinking like, you know, if I fast from dopamine, when I come back, I'm going to have so much dopamine that I'm going to be the most motivated, focused, greatest UX PM of all time. Yeah.

Thanks a lot. And that's just not how it works, unfortunately. No. Yeah, I guess that's a weird way to end this whole thing, but that's how it ends, huh? Yeah. I mean, that's our current understanding. Yeah. I feel like this is one we would be able to do five years from now just to kind of revisit. What do you think? Nah. Okay. I mean, we've never done that. That's dopamine as we understand it in 2024, everybody. That's right.

If you want to know more about dopamine, go out and read about it, but be very specific and selective of who you go read. There are some popular people who know what they're talking about out there, but there's plenty that don't. So I guess if you run across somebody who refers to dopamine as a pleasure chemical or something like that, just turn around and walk away and go find somebody else. How about that, Chuck? That sounds good. Chuck said that sounds good, everybody, and that means it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this from a conductor. We heard from quite a few conductors so far, and that's just on day one after release, so it's...

Pretty great to know that there are people out there that know about this stuff better than we do. That's amazing. Hey, guys. Thank you so much for the episode about conductors. I squealed with joy when I saw it in my feed as I started my hour-long commute. I teach high school orchestra, and I'm an orchestral musician with former aspirations of becoming a professional conductor, so it was fun to hear an outsider's perspective. You were wondering what exactly is on each musician's stand during a performance, and

I love Chuck's analogy of it being like an actor's script with only their lines, and that's pretty close. But sometimes there are small annotations of what to listen for from other sections of the orchestra, particularly after a long section of inactive playing or rests, to help figure out where you are in the music.

That's the part, remember, I just couldn't believe there'd be like nothing to cue you. And I saw other stuff where there were sometimes numeric notations and other conductors said there were long bars and things that you would pay attention to.

Back to the email, though. This is another key job of the conductor, which you didn't touch on as much, is they have the entire score. They often give entrance cues to specific instrumentalists or sections. Additionally, there are usually rehearsal markers that delineate the beginnings of phrases or larger sections. This not only makes rehearsing easier, but also gives greater structure and scaffolding to the player. It's similar to punctuation or paragraph structure in a novel. Experienced musicians can often...

almost more or less feel their entrances based on their contextual knowledge of the piece and the music phrasing. There's an old adage that you spend your time practicing at home to learn your part. Rehearsal time is spent learning everyone else's. Oh, that's cool. It's pretty good. The conductor is a facilitator of this process. You hit the nail on the head, guys. The interpreter of the score. That is from Brittany. Man, Chuck, we did it.

Yeah, we got, I think four or five conductors all wrote in and said, like, we did a pretty darn good job on it. So that feels great. Tell me they said bravo.

I didn't see a Bravo. Sorry. Maybe we'll get one someday. Yeah. That's pretty good. Who is that from? Brittany? Yeah, Brittany. Thanks a lot, Brittany. We appreciate that. And to all the conductors who wrote in, thank you to you all. And if you want to be like all the conductors who wrote in, like Brittany, you can send us an email too. Send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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