Dopamine Expert: How TikTok Is Physically Rewiring Your Brain (Permanent Damage?)

Rat Cocaine Experiment and Stress-Induced Relapse00:00

There's a great experiment where rats were given a lever to press for cocaine. After learning that it releases a lot of dopamine, the rats will press that lever till exhaustion or death, which is essentially the model of addiction that we see in humans. But if the cocaine is then removed, eventually they won't press the lever anymore. If that same rat after a period of time is then exposed to a very painful foot shock, the first thing the rat will do is run over and start pressing that lever again. This shows that when individuals are under extreme stress, they are more vulnerable to going back to compulsive overconsumption of their drug of choice because their brain has already encoded using these high dopamine rewards as a way to get out of that pain.

Introduction to Dr. Anna Lembke00:30

Dr. Anna Lembke is chief of the Stanford Addiction Clinic and a world-leading expert on dopamine. On average, it takes 4 weeks for people to get out of constant state of craving. Our survival depends on figuring out how to live in a world of abundance. We're now seeing the drugification of human connection through social media, dating apps, and artificial intelligence designed to flatter and validate. There's no friction there, pulling us away from the hard things we need to be doing in real life to cultivate real life relationships. We cannot go in that direction because in a world of abundance, we are entertaining ourselves to death.