There's a really classic experiment now that people use to demonstrate this.

Take two rats, and the rats independently, separate cages, can lever press for food, or they can access food.

There's a little bit of dopamine that's released anytime they get some food, so we always thought that food, like many other rewards, like food, sex, warmth when you're cold, cool when you're too warm, is triggering the release of dopamine.

But someone had the good idea to deplete dopamine in one of those animals, and then what you find is that the animal without dopamine still enjoys food, still enjoys other pleasures.

So dopamine's not really involved in the enjoyment of those pleasures, it's involved in motivation, because if you make the animal have to move just one rat's length, believe it or not, to get to that lever, the animal with dopamine will work to go get that thing.

It will work through some effort to go get the reward, whereas the animal, or it turns out the human without much dopamine, can still experience pleasure.

They can sit on their couch and cram their face with pleasure-inducing calories or what have you, watch pleasure-inducing things on the television, but they have very little motivation to go pursue things that will deliver them pleasure.

It's actually, what's really driven the forward evolution of our species has been the desire to go seek things beyond the confines of our skin.

And when I say the common currency is dopamine, what I mean is the molecule dopamine, when secreted in the brain, makes us pursue things, build things, create things, makes us want new things that we don't currently already have.

And so it has a lot of dimensions to it, but rather than think about dopamine as a signal for reward, like a dopamine hit, we classically talk about it, it's more accurate really to think about dopamine as driving motivation and craving to go seek rewards.

That's the RAD experiment.

And it's a way of tabulating where we are in our life.

Are we doing well or are we doing poorly?

And that happens on very short timescales, like do you wake up feeling good?

Or do you wake up feeling kind of low?

Or on long timescales, if you're halfway through a long degree or you're halfway through your life, how are you doing?

How do you gauge that?

Well, it has everything to do with how much dopamine you were releasing in the previous days and weeks and years.

So you're always comparing it and all of this is subconscious.

But what's cool is that once you make these processes conscious, once you understand a little bit about how dopamine is released and how it changes our perspective and our behavior, then you can actually work with it.

And so we go back to this example of the person that's not motivated, that can't get off the couch, that doesn't want to do anything.

Well, this is the problem.

They are effectively the rat with no dopamine, but they can still achieve some sense of pleasure by consuming excess calories, by consuming social media.

And look, I'm not judging.

I do this stuff too, right?

Scrolling social media.

If you've ever scrolled social media and you're like, I don't even know why I'm doing this.

It doesn't really feel that good.

And I can remember a time where you'd see something that was just so cool or you'd see something online.

I remember this when TED Talks first came out.

I was like, this is amazing.

These are some, at least some of them are really smart people sharing really cool insights.

And then now that they're like a gazillion TED Talks, I remember spending a winter in my office when I was a junior professor, cleaning my office finally and binging TED Talks in the background, thinking this is a good use of my time.

Pretty soon, they all sucked to me.

I was like, this isn't good.

So what you need to do is stop watching TED Talks for a while, wait, and then they become interesting again.

And that's this pain pleasure balance.

And so for people that aren't feeling motivated, the problem is they're not motivated, but they're getting just enough or excess sustenance.

So they're getting the little mild hits of opioid, it becomes an opioid system.

And if you think about the opioid drugs, as opposed to dopaminergic drugs, dopaminergic drugs make people rabid for everything.

Drugs of abuse like cocaine and amphetamine make people incredibly outward directed.

They hardly notice anything except what they want more of, more, more, more, more, more.

It's very, it's bad because those drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the reward.

It's very circular.

Only the drug can give that much dopamine.

Nothing they could pursue would give them as much dopamine as the drug itself.

So there's that, and then there's the kind of opioid-like effects of constantly indulging oneself with social media or with video games or with food or with anything to the point where it no longer evokes the motivation and craving.

And this is really the new evolution of the understanding of dopamine in neuroscience, which is that dopamine itself is not the reward.

It's the buildup to the reward.

And the reward has more of a kind of opioid bliss-like property, which itself is not bad if it's endogenous, released from within.

But when we can just sit there like the rat with no dopamine, gorging ourselves with pleasures, so to speak, what you end up with is somebody that feels really unmotivated and those pleasures no longer work to tickle those feel-good circuits.

And so there's no reason for them to go out and pursue anything.

The problem is not pleasures.

The problem is that pleasure experienced without prior requirement for pursuit is terrible for us.

It's terrible for us as individuals.

It's terrible for us as groups.

And I have great confidence in the human species to work this out.

But we are finding now, and we are going to increasingly find, that those who will be successful, young or old, are going to be those people who can create their own internal buffers.

They're going to be able to control their relationship to pleasures because the proximity to pleasures and their availability is the problem.

If you look at the increase in use of drugs of abuse or prescription medication, which at least at the first pass delivered pleasure, pain relief, the whole issue with the opioid crisis and dopaminergic drugs like Ritalin, Adderall, sometimes there's a clinical need, but tons of people are taking those recreationally now or to study.

Huge dopamine increases are what those cause.

That is a problem.

It's a serious problem because it creates a cycle where you need more of that specific thing.

I would say addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.

God, that's such a good definition.

And I don't like to comment too much on enlightenment because I don't really know what that is as a neurobiologist, but a good life, we could say, is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure.

And even better, a good life is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure and includes pleasure through motivation and hard work.

And understanding this pain-pleasure balance whereby if you experience pain and you can continue to be in that friction and exert effort, the rewards are that much greater when they arrive.

And so I think that if you look at any drug of abuse or any situation where somebody isn't motivated or thinks, now they may have clinically diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but a lot of what people think is ADHD, it turns out, is people just over-consuming dopamine from various sources.

And then, and also the context within a TikTok feed is the context switch is insane.

The brain has never seen, first of all, this is the first time in human evolution that we wrote with our thumbs, but that's a pretty benign shift.

And then the other shift is normally you walk from one room to another or from a field into the trees or from a hut into a house or whatever it is, but now you can get 10,000 context switches in that 30 minutes of scrolling on Instagram or TikTok.

And so it's all about self-regulation.

You're going to select for the people that can self-regulate.

And so then people say, well, how do you self-regulate?

How do kids self-regulate?

Well, this is my hope.

And one of the reasons I've gotten excited about public education and teaching neuroscience is that this is a place where knowledge of knowledge actually can allow oneself to intervene.

When you think, I'm feeling low, I don't feel good.

Nothing really feels good.

Am I depressed?

Maybe.

But maybe you're just, you've saturated the dopamine circuits.

You're now in the pain part of things.

What do you do?

Well, you have to stop.

You need to replenish dopamine.

You need to stop engaging with this behavior and then your pleasure for it will come back.

But you have to constantly control the hinge.

It's not just about being back and forth on the seesaw.

You have to make sure the hinge doesn't get stuck in pain or in pleasure.

Understanding that pain and pleasure are in this really dynamic balance can also help us in the following way.

Any pain that you feel, the longer day, the less sleep, the kind of agony that things aren't working.

That power outlet doesn't work or the internet is slow, whatever it is.

The amount of pleasure that you will eventually experience is directly related, excuse me, to how much pain you experience.

So we know this from actually what nowadays would be considered quite barbaric and unethical experiments where they would give people electrical shocks and they would measure their response.

And then they'd say, we're going to increase it.

We're going to increase it.

Eventually they get to the point where a slight shock that was previously very painful actually evokes a sense of pleasure.

Now you couldn't do these experiments anymore.

These are not the experiments I do in my lab.

These are older experiments.

But for instance, and this has been discussed in scientific research papers, giving somebody like a 10 minute ice bath, for instance, or even a three minute ice bath or a one minute ice bath is quite painful.

But there was a study from the University of Prague, a European Journal of Physiology showed that after a painful ice bath stimulus, the amount of dopamine release goes up for two and a half hours to 250% above baseline.

And that's not because the ice bath itself evokes dopamine release.

A lot of people think, oh, cold water evokes dopamine release.

No, pain evokes dopamine release after the pain is over.

Just understanding the more friction and pain that you experience, the greater the dopamine reward you will get later.

And that serves as its own amplifier of the whole process of pursuing more dopamine.

So the keys are to pursue rewards, but understand that the pursuit is actually the reward if you want to have repeated wins.

Then what you realize is your capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator, not just seeking dopamine rewards, that is infinite.