February 28, 2026 • 45 mins
Dopamine is perhaps the most talked-about, most misunderstood biochemical in our bodies. It’s linked to not only addiction and depravity, but also focus, motivation, and living a productive life. How can one molecule be so many things to so many people? Find out all about it in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:21):
a great episode, so I hope you like it. Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Joshing. There's Chuck
and Jerry's here too. The three amigos back together again
after some massively triumphant live shows.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah, we did a little Northeast Spring swing.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yeah, and it was great.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
It was a good show. Which one the podcast topic
that did that we did live? Oh, I know that
we're doing all year.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I got to it was pretty good. I love that
that topic.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
That's what you call an on secuitter.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
But it does feel good to be back, doesn't it.
Back in the studio, back doing what we're born to do.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
I kind of prefer on stage, but sure, this is
great to do.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
You you like the thrill of the audience, the roar
of the crowd, that bowl running at you.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Nice, I like it too, sometimes when I'm not totally
terrified because I drank too much energy drinks.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Well, I wonder if your dopamine receptors are functioning as
they should.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, that's a great question, Chuck. And that'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 neurochemical, certainly neurochemical maybe substance in your body
at all than dopamine. We used to think we had
(01:56):
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. 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 even gone to like Cleveland
Clinic website or WebMD website or Harvard Health has some articles,
(02:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, and this may be the most oft covered stuff
you should know, thing that hasn't gotten its own title yet.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Yeah. Man, that dopamine is the reigning champ right now.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah, we talk about this stuff all the time, it seems.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
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 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 you behave
(03:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
It sure does. So it is, like you said, a neurotransmitter,
one of more than a hundred 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
(03:56):
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. Ledgewalkers, Yeah, ledgewalkers. But it
does all kinds of things. That's just the where it
makes the newspaper headlines. But we should probably talk a
(04:19):
little bit about just the narrow transmitter cycle that it
goes through.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
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
(04:48):
makes dopamine up, it's essential ingredient tyrosine and amino acid,
can cross the blood brain barrier, and when it gets there,
it gets a big fat from something called tyrosine hydroxylase,
and that converts it into dopamine and all of a sudden,
your brain's like, yes, let's go.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
No, that's a bit.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
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 the stuff, and we produce
about three times as much as other primates do.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yes, And in fact, Emily Deans wrote an article in
twenty eleven 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
(06:02):
collectively form our mental map of the world, of how
we're to behavior on 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
(06:26):
has allowed us to become as successful as we are
compared to other animals in that nuts like it could
all just come down to dopamine essentially.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah, man, opposable thumbs maybe.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Sure, But I mean, what are opposable thumbs if you
can't have get the wear with all the to move it.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
True, but if you had the wherewithal to move it,
you could grab something.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yes, you can use the heels of both hands just
like a thumb.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Are you under selling the opposable thumb?
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Yes, I'm sick of the imposable thumb always hogging the spot.
It's dopamine's time.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
You can get those removed. You know, see how you do?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
I guess that sounds like a dare to me, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Say goodbye to your tennis game.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
I can play it just by holding the racket with
the both heels in my hand.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
I guess we should have said pickleball. That'd be more current, right,
I don't play pickleball. I haven't tried it yet.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
I want to, though, Okay, Well, there's plenty of places
and people to play it with.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Yet I have found no one or no place.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Oh, I'm sure somebody will write in and offer to play.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
With you, of course, and then I go out there
and I like blow my acl or something.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Oh god, that was nice.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
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
(07:58):
are all kinds of things that dope I mean does,
and depending what kinds of neurons it's talking to and
it's introducing to one another, it's gonna have different effects
on the human body.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yes, So there's D one to D five 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 pathways being followed, all sorts of different
stuff can happen. Dopaminees associated with motor control, learning, memory.
(08:33):
Malfunctions in it can result in psychosis. They use dopamine
as a vaso stimulant to treat heart conditions. That 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 I said there's four of them total.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Did you want to talk about this?
Speaker 2 (08:53):
I feel like we should. Okay.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
The first one is the nigros striatal tract. Nice, you
mentioned motor control first, and that's the tract that has
to do with motor control.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, so if those aren't working correctly. The one that
the dopamine neurons are the dopaminergic pathway in the nigrostriadal
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 will probably talk about a little
(09:26):
bit more later that movie. Yeah, Okay, I got a great,
great bit up my sleeve.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Okay. The second pathway is a Mezzo Corty call 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 you know, how it organizes your overall
sort of priorities.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yes, and now it's time to talk about the most
random dopaminergic pathway of all the two bear fundibular pathway
two boro in fundibular.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Yeah, I think get it right the first time.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Okay, we'll edit out the second one. Then we'll put
in a slide whistle over it, so that connects us
the hypothalamus and the petuitary gland. And it's from what
I can tell, I was like, well, what else does
it do? It's sole The sole role of this pathway
is to block the production of milk or yes, to
(10:27):
prevent the production of milk in the female breast of mammals.
That's what it does. That's that that's that pathway's role.
And if you block that pathway, the milk production begins.
Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah? We talked about that in the two parter, the
old Breastfeeding two parter.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Oh yeah, oh I don't remember that.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah yeah, wow where No, I have a terrible memory.
I know you're making fun of me.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
There's there's also the mesolimbic pathway. We've talked a lot
about the Olympics in many episodes, but reward and emotion
and this is the one where this is the one
that gets all the pressed 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
(11:17):
into how dopamine works.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Right, This is the reason why some people get the
chemical drawing of the molecular drawing of dopamine like tattooed
on their wrists, because they're such so hedonic and into pleasure.
That's why you might see somebody with that because of
that pathway.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
I never heard of that.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Yeah, it's a thing. Unfortunately it turns out to be
a misinterpretation, but it is a thing that people do sometimes.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
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,
(12:08):
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
(12:29):
dopamine is just dopey.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Right. Here's a great example of just how wrong we
got dopamine. It turns out the process that dopamine is
excreted and crosses into the synapse and creates like an
electrical electrical transmission in the brain is the exact opposite,
totally volume transmission.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
It could not be more opposite then the idea that
just floods slowly across the brain and whatever it runs
into it runs into. We found that in milliseconds, a
precise squirt of dopamine hits exactly the right neuron in
exactly the right place. It's right on the money. That's
how dopamine is excreted, the exact opposite of volume transmission.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Yeah, and we learned that not too long ago twenty eighteen,
medical researchers at HAVID released this paper and said, hey,
guess what, everyone is the opposite of everything you've been saying,
and everyone want oh okay, sorry about that. Sure might be.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
So, after the dopamine is excreted and it does its job,
it actually breaks down remarkably quickly. It turns into something
it's metabolized and it is something called homovanillic acid, right,
And from what I can tell, I don't know what
the homo does to the vanillic acid, but vanillic acid
(13:50):
is the flavor of vanilla. So from what I can tell,
if you tasted the homovanillic acid, which is like the
metabolite found in cirro spinal 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, and I don't know. Also,
(14:14):
if we said that just twenty thousand neurons are capable
of synthesizing dopamine, but that's a really small proportion of
the total number of neurons we have to about one
hundred billion, I think, yeah, absolutely, you want to take
a break.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
So check this whole under 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 if the person you love like touches your hand.
If you get like an a from from the teacher, like,
you're gonna get a hit at dopamine, and that's what
(15:21):
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 twentieth 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
(15:42):
for a really long time. It's still around today.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Yeah, for sure. There was a researcher speaking of old
named James Olds in the fifties and sixties who did
some experiments with rats and said, hey, every time I
give these rats a little electrical stimulation and just the
right place right there behind the ear, they're going to
keep pulling that lever down or whatever act I'm making
(16:06):
them do. That. They'll just do that over and over
and over and over and over as long as I
keep stimulating that area.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Right. So what they said was, Okay, there's something going
on with dopamine and this I guess pleasurable act that
the rat is doing to itself, and that.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Got followed up in Whoa, Whoa.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
That got followed up in the seventies 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, no, I don't want any. And
crucially critically, roy Wise and his colleagues misinterpreted that as
(16:51):
a lack of experience of pleasure, not a lack of motivation.
And it wasn't until the eighties that some other people
came along and they were like, no, oh, we've been
getting this wrong all this time.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Yeah, in the eighties they use sugar instead of meth amphetamine,
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,
(17:24):
and he enjoys it. But and this is the key,
it's not coming back and saying give me more sugar,
Give me more sugar.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Right, or give me more meth.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
So this whole thing, this changed our understanding, at least
in the 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 an ahdonia or an hodonia. It was
(17:57):
a lack of motivation to seek out that. 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,
(18:19):
the more dopamine gets released. Like, for example, I think
I saw it like eating something that tastes really good
increases your dopamine levels by one hundred percent sometimes yeah,
but cocaine increases your dopamine levels ten times that. So
the more intense the pleasurable experience is, the more dopamine
gets released. So it's definitely associated with it. What they
(18:42):
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's found, and it has this mysterious smile on its
face because I know you can't prove anything.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Yeah, well, it's liking versus And that's a theory of
reward behavior. Where liking is that pleasure that hits 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
(19:22):
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's 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
(19:45):
of it on your tongue and you'd love that stuff.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
You're 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. 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
(20:08):
related in that way.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
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 more bang
(20:30):
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, your brain says
that was way way better than I thought it was
going to be, so it reinforces.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
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
(21:07):
peanut butter pie and eating peanut butter pie, so you'll
have more motivation to do it next time.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Right, And this is where that Awakenings anecdote comes in.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Let's hear it.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
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 Sachs in the book and then later the
movie Awakenings. There was an epidemic of something called encephalitic lethargia,
(21:57):
which is what happened to Robert de Niro's character. Remember
as a boy, he caught this thing and he just
kind of frozen place. It's where you develop Parkinson's symptoms
so much that you just don't you can't move. You
cannot move. You have you don't have the required dopamine
to actually move, so you're just sitting there, frozen in
(22:19):
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 just enough, they can
actually overcome that being frozen in place. And so there's
a famous scene where Oliver Sax tossed one of the
patients some oranges and she caught them like she was
(22:42):
a frozen sets and all of a sudden she's catching
oranges and then juggles with them. 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.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Great scene.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
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
parkins and symptoms can be overcome or overwhelmed by that
dopamine hit.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Yeah. Absolutely, And then jumping back to that first one,
the prediction era, 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
(23:42):
pot in the middle of the table you're playing poker,
and you lose it the last second, your dopamine level
will be about the same as if you had actually
won it. Yes, which is pretty remarkable.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
And then I think it kind of qualifies as a
third interpretation, The most current study I've seen sees dopamine
is essentially the thing that allows us to learn. If
you connect one thing to another, it's because dopamine had
you make that connection, and then depending on what kind
of effect those two things have on you, that connection
(24:17):
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
(24:40):
couldn't make connections. And it seems like dopamine is the basis.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Of all that.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, pretty cool, Like the whole world would suffer because
we wouldn't be podcasting.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Chuck, Oh, that's debatable. You know, were not poopooing 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 is unfairly maybe gotten
all the press. But we do have to talk about
(25:10):
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 you know, the idea that you want
to keep using those drugs because it's making you feel good.
(25:31):
And when we're talking about you know, you're talking about
the 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
ten percent of the people that have had that treatment
turn into gambling addicts. And I would imagine there are
(25:53):
people 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 pretty it's a
pretty clunky way to deal with that, I think.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
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 and 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
(26:28):
going to have all sorts of other knock on effects.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
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
(26:53):
to do with that too. But as far as we know,
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 math.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
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
(27:33):
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 definitely a part of it.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
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 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
(28:11):
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.
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
(28:33):
addiction that to me smells vaguely of being almost out
of date.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
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 be able to
do drugs all the time, they'd never get addicted.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Sure, but you know they have other negative effects on
the body.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Sure, sure, I can't forget about that.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah. Yeah. The other bad thing obviously, if you're gonna
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. Is it's
not just shutting down the dopamine receptor that makes you
want to, you know, do more cocaine or whatever. It's
just shutting your dopamine receptors down. So you mentioned it earlier, Anedonia,
(29:29):
that's the idea that you don't receive pleasure from any activity.
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.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, and then there's one other factor involved that with
fewer dopamine receptor sites. Remember you said that one of
those dopaminergic pathways is really to executive function, like impulse control, responsibility,
that kind of stuff. Yeah, Well, with lower levels of dopamine,
the theory goes that you are more likely to engage
(30:12):
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 partially also because
you don't have the impulse control that you did before
you became addicted to drugs in your dopamine receptor started
shutting down.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
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,
(30:56):
you know.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
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 that in fact, they find that they have fewer
what are called autoreceptors. Apparently, over time we've evolved to
(31:22):
create on dopamine neural cells a site called the auto
receptor that actually catches some of the dopamine. It helps
regulate it, like it never makes it out, so it
keeps the amount of dopamine down to a regulated level.
So the fewer auto receptors you have, if you're still
pumping out dopamine, you get a much greater impact from
(31:42):
that dopamine. And they have correlated that to risk taking.
People who have fewer dopaminergic auto receptors take more risks,
at least according to some studies.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
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 in London in twenty fifteen that said
subjects whose dopamine levels was higher it was boosted artificially
with medication would choose risky options more often if it
(32:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
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 a like an across the board.
(32:50):
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. And we're not even certain exactactly what
effect the dopamine is having. We're almost just kind of
like seeing effects that are the behavior of people with
ADHD and saying, hey, we know that dopamine does that,
(33:13):
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 or almost
certain that dopamine drives at least some of the ADHD symptoms.
(33:35):
It's just because of that, people have made leaps in understanding.
Like there's a there's a long standing myth about people
with ADHD that they do these impulsive behaviors to get
a hit of dopamine. Well, it's based on that old
idea that dopamine is a pleasure producing chemical or reward
producing chemical, where instead it might be that people do
(33:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
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. All right, so we're back, and
(34:45):
we promise talk of social media because I think everyone
it's 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 to various interacting
with veryarious social media platforms is so old, dude. I
know that's great in this case, I love being old.
(35:08):
I don't want any of it.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
I'm with you.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
But in any case, all of that stuff combines to
give you a hit of dopamine. And it's specific and
you know, 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 twenty eighteen. It
(35:30):
was it was a big news item when they were
I don't know, it was like congressional testimony or something.
I can't remember exactly, but there was a VP at
Facebook who came out and was basically like, hey, this
is something we did on purpose and it was a
core foundation. Was the really the quote that kind of
(35:51):
stuck out with how people behave using our platform, like
it was a part of the core strategy to get
p people to come back again and again and again.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Yeah, and that strategy was based on This was a
Chamath Polyhapedia 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 twenty eighteen, that
(36:24):
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,
(36:46):
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 dopemine, we get it. Dopamine hit and so we
learned to come back. And apparently also randomness has a
lot to do with it, because the as we start
(37:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Yeah, totally. There's also this psychiatrist name doctor Cameron s
ep Ah. I guess Sepa is how you said that?
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Sepa or Sepa okay.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
One of those three who came out and said, all right,
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 to catch all term
(38:02):
basically for any sort of addictive behavior like reinforcement. And
you can go on a dopamine fast and like you know,
put that, put that social media app down for a
couple of weeks, and when you come back, it's just
gonna like your brain's gonna have a little rest from
that thing and you're gonna feel amazing about how much
(38:24):
you love it when you come back. And that's not
at all what doctor Cameron was talking about or meant.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
No, huh, Doctor doctor Sipa Seppa was basically saying like
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 gonna take it literally. And
so there was this this movement I think people still
(38:50):
do it, of self denial of everything, from like people
stopped interacting with other people, people stopped eating food they
found pleasurable, they stopped talking if they didn't need to
anything that could conceivably give you a release of dopamine,
and the whole their premise was that if they did that,
(39:13):
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,
(39:37):
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 doctor Sipa
essentially using the wrong term.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
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
(40:10):
app for your happiness.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Yeah, our moms used to call it going to play
outside for a while or summer, I think is another
term it used to be called. 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, you
could really do a good for yourself by taking a
(40:35):
dopamine fast or a break from emotional eating, 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 spreeze, and recreational drugs. But
he also said, you know, anything that you feel like
(40:57):
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 dopamine fast on it,
(41:18):
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 gonna have so
much dopamine that I'm going to be the most motivated, focused,
(41:39):
greatest ux PM of all time. Yeah, and that's just
not how it works, unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
No.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, I guess that's a weird way to end this
whole thing, but that's how it ends.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Huh Yeah, I mean that's our current understanding.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah. I feel like this is one we would be
able to do five years from now, is to kind
of revisit what do you think? Nah?
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Okay, I mean we've never done that.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
That's dopamine as we understand it in twenty twenty four, everybody.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
That sounds good, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
So that sounds good everybody, and that means it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Hey, guys, thank you so much for the episode about conductors.
I squealed with joy when I saw it in my
feed as they started my hour long commute. I teach
high school orchestra and I'm an orchid stroll orchestral excuse me,
a musician with former aspirations of becoming a professional conductor.
So it's fun to hear an outsider's perspective. You're wondering
what exactly is on each musician's stand during a performance.
(43:13):
I love Chuck's analogy of it being like an actors
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,
(43:36):
and I saw other stuff where there were sometimes numeric notations,
and other conductors that 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 as they have the entire score.
They often give entrance cues to specific instrumentalists or sections. Additionally,
(43:59):
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 and a novel.
Experienced musicians can often almost more or less feel their
entrances based on their contextual knowledge of the piece and
(44:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Oh that's cool, it's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
The conductor's facilitator of this process. You hit the nail
on the head, guys, the interpreter of the score. That
is from Brittany Man Chuck.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
We did it.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Tell me they said bravo.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
I didn't see a Bravo.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Sorry, I mean we'll get one someday. Yeah, that's pretty goot.
Who is that from Brittany? Yeah, Brittany, thanks a lot, Brittany,
ciate 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 to send it off
to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You Know.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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
(00:21):
a great episode, so I hope you like it. Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Joshing. There's Chuck
and Jerry's here too. The three amigos back together again
after some massively triumphant live shows.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah, we did a little Northeast Spring swing.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yeah, and it was great.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
It was a good show. Which one the podcast topic
that did that we did live? Oh, I know that
we're doing all year.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I got to it was pretty good. I love that
that topic.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
That's what you call an on secuitter.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
But it does feel good to be back, doesn't it.
Back in the studio, back doing what we're born to do.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
I kind of prefer on stage, but sure, this is
great to do.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
You you like the thrill of the audience, the roar
of the crowd, that bowl running at you.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Nice, I like it too, sometimes when I'm not totally
terrified because I drank too much energy drinks.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Well, I wonder if your dopamine receptors are functioning as
they should.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, that's a great question, Chuck. And that'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 neurochemical, certainly neurochemical maybe substance in your body
at all than dopamine. We used to think we had
(01:56):
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. 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 even gone to like Cleveland
Clinic website or WebMD website or Harvard Health has some articles,
(02:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, and this may be the most oft covered stuff
you should know, thing that hasn't gotten its own title yet.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Yeah. Man, that dopamine is the reigning champ right now.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah, we talk about this stuff all the time, it seems.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
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 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 you behave
(03:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
It sure does. So it is, like you said, a neurotransmitter,
one of more than a hundred 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
(03:56):
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. Ledgewalkers, Yeah, ledgewalkers. But it
does all kinds of things. That's just the where it
makes the newspaper headlines. But we should probably talk a
(04:19):
little bit about just the narrow transmitter cycle that it
goes through.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
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
(04:48):
makes dopamine up, it's essential ingredient tyrosine and amino acid,
can cross the blood brain barrier, and when it gets there,
it gets a big fat from something called tyrosine hydroxylase,
and that converts it into dopamine and all of a sudden,
your brain's like, yes, let's go.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
No, that's a bit.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
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 the stuff, and we produce
about three times as much as other primates do.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yes, And in fact, Emily Deans wrote an article in
twenty eleven 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
(06:02):
collectively form our mental map of the world, of how
we're to behavior on 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
(06:26):
has allowed us to become as successful as we are
compared to other animals in that nuts like it could
all just come down to dopamine essentially.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah, man, opposable thumbs maybe.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Sure, But I mean, what are opposable thumbs if you
can't have get the wear with all the to move it.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
True, but if you had the wherewithal to move it,
you could grab something.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yes, you can use the heels of both hands just
like a thumb.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Are you under selling the opposable thumb?
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Yes, I'm sick of the imposable thumb always hogging the spot.
It's dopamine's time.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
You can get those removed. You know, see how you do?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
I guess that sounds like a dare to me, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Say goodbye to your tennis game.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
I can play it just by holding the racket with
the both heels in my hand.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
I guess we should have said pickleball. That'd be more current, right,
I don't play pickleball. I haven't tried it yet.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
I want to, though, Okay, Well, there's plenty of places
and people to play it with.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Yet I have found no one or no place.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Oh, I'm sure somebody will write in and offer to play.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
With you, of course, and then I go out there
and I like blow my acl or something.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Oh god, that was nice.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
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
(07:58):
are all kinds of things that dope I mean does,
and depending what kinds of neurons it's talking to and
it's introducing to one another, it's gonna have different effects
on the human body.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yes, So there's D one to D five 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 pathways being followed, all sorts of different
stuff can happen. Dopaminees associated with motor control, learning, memory.
(08:33):
Malfunctions in it can result in psychosis. They use dopamine
as a vaso stimulant to treat heart conditions. That 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 I said there's four of them total.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Did you want to talk about this?
Speaker 2 (08:53):
I feel like we should. Okay.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
The first one is the nigros striatal tract. Nice, you
mentioned motor control first, and that's the tract that has
to do with motor control.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, so if those aren't working correctly. The one that
the dopamine neurons are the dopaminergic pathway in the nigrostriadal
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 will probably talk about a little
(09:26):
bit more later that movie. Yeah, Okay, I got a great,
great bit up my sleeve.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Okay. The second pathway is a Mezzo Corty call 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 you know, how it organizes your overall
sort of priorities.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yes, and now it's time to talk about the most
random dopaminergic pathway of all the two bear fundibular pathway
two boro in fundibular.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Yeah, I think get it right the first time.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Okay, we'll edit out the second one. Then we'll put
in a slide whistle over it, so that connects us
the hypothalamus and the petuitary gland. And it's from what
I can tell, I was like, well, what else does
it do? It's sole The sole role of this pathway
is to block the production of milk or yes, to
(10:27):
prevent the production of milk in the female breast of mammals.
That's what it does. That's that that's that pathway's role.
And if you block that pathway, the milk production begins.
Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah? We talked about that in the two parter, the
old Breastfeeding two parter.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Oh yeah, oh I don't remember that.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah yeah, wow where No, I have a terrible memory.
I know you're making fun of me.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
There's there's also the mesolimbic pathway. We've talked a lot
about the Olympics in many episodes, but reward and emotion
and this is the one where this is the one
that gets all the pressed 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
(11:17):
into how dopamine works.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Right, This is the reason why some people get the
chemical drawing of the molecular drawing of dopamine like tattooed
on their wrists, because they're such so hedonic and into pleasure.
That's why you might see somebody with that because of
that pathway.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
I never heard of that.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Yeah, it's a thing. Unfortunately it turns out to be
a misinterpretation, but it is a thing that people do sometimes.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
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,
(12:08):
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
(12:29):
dopamine is just dopey.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Right. Here's a great example of just how wrong we
got dopamine. It turns out the process that dopamine is
excreted and crosses into the synapse and creates like an
electrical electrical transmission in the brain is the exact opposite,
totally volume transmission.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
It could not be more opposite then the idea that
just floods slowly across the brain and whatever it runs
into it runs into. We found that in milliseconds, a
precise squirt of dopamine hits exactly the right neuron in
exactly the right place. It's right on the money. That's
how dopamine is excreted, the exact opposite of volume transmission.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Yeah, and we learned that not too long ago twenty eighteen,
medical researchers at HAVID released this paper and said, hey,
guess what, everyone is the opposite of everything you've been saying,
and everyone want oh okay, sorry about that. Sure might be.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
So, after the dopamine is excreted and it does its job,
it actually breaks down remarkably quickly. It turns into something
it's metabolized and it is something called homovanillic acid, right,
And from what I can tell, I don't know what
the homo does to the vanillic acid, but vanillic acid
(13:50):
is the flavor of vanilla. So from what I can tell,
if you tasted the homovanillic acid, which is like the
metabolite found in cirro spinal 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, and I don't know. Also,
(14:14):
if we said that just twenty thousand neurons are capable
of synthesizing dopamine, but that's a really small proportion of
the total number of neurons we have to about one
hundred billion, I think, yeah, absolutely, you want to take
a break.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
So check this whole under 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 if the person you love like touches your hand.
If you get like an a from from the teacher, like,
you're gonna get a hit at dopamine, and that's what
(15:21):
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 twentieth 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
(15:42):
for a really long time. It's still around today.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Yeah, for sure. There was a researcher speaking of old
named James Olds in the fifties and sixties who did
some experiments with rats and said, hey, every time I
give these rats a little electrical stimulation and just the
right place right there behind the ear, they're going to
keep pulling that lever down or whatever act I'm making
(16:06):
them do. That. They'll just do that over and over
and over and over and over as long as I
keep stimulating that area.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Right. So what they said was, Okay, there's something going
on with dopamine and this I guess pleasurable act that
the rat is doing to itself, and that.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Got followed up in Whoa, Whoa.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
That got followed up in the seventies 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, no, I don't want any. And
crucially critically, roy Wise and his colleagues misinterpreted that as
(16:51):
a lack of experience of pleasure, not a lack of motivation.
And it wasn't until the eighties that some other people
came along and they were like, no, oh, we've been
getting this wrong all this time.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Yeah, in the eighties they use sugar instead of meth amphetamine,
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,
(17:24):
and he enjoys it. But and this is the key,
it's not coming back and saying give me more sugar,
Give me more sugar.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Right, or give me more meth.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
So this whole thing, this changed our understanding, at least
in the 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 an ahdonia or an hodonia. It was
(17:57):
a lack of motivation to seek out that. 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,
(18:19):
the more dopamine gets released. Like, for example, I think
I saw it like eating something that tastes really good
increases your dopamine levels by one hundred percent sometimes yeah,
but cocaine increases your dopamine levels ten times that. So
the more intense the pleasurable experience is, the more dopamine
gets released. So it's definitely associated with it. What they
(18:42):
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's found, and it has this mysterious smile on its
face because I know you can't prove anything.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Yeah, well, it's liking versus And that's a theory of
reward behavior. Where liking is that pleasure that hits 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
(19:22):
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's 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
(19:45):
of it on your tongue and you'd love that stuff.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
You're 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. 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
(20:08):
related in that way.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
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 more bang
(20:30):
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, your brain says
that was way way better than I thought it was
going to be, so it reinforces.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
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
(21:07):
peanut butter pie and eating peanut butter pie, so you'll
have more motivation to do it next time.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Right, And this is where that Awakenings anecdote comes in.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Let's hear it.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
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 Sachs in the book and then later the
movie Awakenings. There was an epidemic of something called encephalitic lethargia,
(21:57):
which is what happened to Robert de Niro's character. Remember
as a boy, he caught this thing and he just
kind of frozen place. It's where you develop Parkinson's symptoms
so much that you just don't you can't move. You
cannot move. You have you don't have the required dopamine
to actually move, so you're just sitting there, frozen in
(22:19):
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 just enough, they can
actually overcome that being frozen in place. And so there's
a famous scene where Oliver Sax tossed one of the
patients some oranges and she caught them like she was
(22:42):
a frozen sets and all of a sudden she's catching
oranges and then juggles with them. 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.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Great scene.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
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
parkins and symptoms can be overcome or overwhelmed by that
dopamine hit.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Yeah. Absolutely, And then jumping back to that first one,
the prediction era, 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
(23:42):
pot in the middle of the table you're playing poker,
and you lose it the last second, your dopamine level
will be about the same as if you had actually
won it. Yes, which is pretty remarkable.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
And then I think it kind of qualifies as a
third interpretation, The most current study I've seen sees dopamine
is essentially the thing that allows us to learn. If
you connect one thing to another, it's because dopamine had
you make that connection, and then depending on what kind
of effect those two things have on you, that connection
(24:17):
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
(24:40):
couldn't make connections. And it seems like dopamine is the basis.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Of all that.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, pretty cool, Like the whole world would suffer because
we wouldn't be podcasting.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Chuck, Oh, that's debatable. You know, were not poopooing 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 is unfairly maybe gotten
all the press. But we do have to talk about
(25:10):
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 you know, the idea that you want
to keep using those drugs because it's making you feel good.
(25:31):
And when we're talking about you know, you're talking about
the 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
ten percent of the people that have had that treatment
turn into gambling addicts. And I would imagine there are
(25:53):
people 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 pretty it's a
pretty clunky way to deal with that, I think.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
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 and 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
(26:28):
going to have all sorts of other knock on effects.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
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
(26:53):
to do with that too. But as far as we know,
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 math.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
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
(27:33):
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 definitely a part of it.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
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 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
(28:11):
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.
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
(28:33):
addiction that to me smells vaguely of being almost out
of date.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
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 be able to
do drugs all the time, they'd never get addicted.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Sure, but you know they have other negative effects on
the body.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Sure, sure, I can't forget about that.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah. Yeah. The other bad thing obviously, if you're gonna
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. Is it's
not just shutting down the dopamine receptor that makes you
want to, you know, do more cocaine or whatever. It's
just shutting your dopamine receptors down. So you mentioned it earlier, Anedonia,
(29:29):
that's the idea that you don't receive pleasure from any activity.
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.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, and then there's one other factor involved that with
fewer dopamine receptor sites. Remember you said that one of
those dopaminergic pathways is really to executive function, like impulse control, responsibility,
that kind of stuff. Yeah, Well, with lower levels of dopamine,
the theory goes that you are more likely to engage
(30:12):
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 partially also because
you don't have the impulse control that you did before
you became addicted to drugs in your dopamine receptor started
shutting down.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
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,
(30:56):
you know.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
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 that in fact, they find that they have fewer
what are called autoreceptors. Apparently, over time we've evolved to
(31:22):
create on dopamine neural cells a site called the auto
receptor that actually catches some of the dopamine. It helps
regulate it, like it never makes it out, so it
keeps the amount of dopamine down to a regulated level.
So the fewer auto receptors you have, if you're still
pumping out dopamine, you get a much greater impact from
(31:42):
that dopamine. And they have correlated that to risk taking.
People who have fewer dopaminergic auto receptors take more risks,
at least according to some studies.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
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 in London in twenty fifteen that said
subjects whose dopamine levels was higher it was boosted artificially
with medication would choose risky options more often if it
(32:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
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 a like an across the board.
(32:50):
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. And we're not even certain exactactly what
effect the dopamine is having. We're almost just kind of
like seeing effects that are the behavior of people with
ADHD and saying, hey, we know that dopamine does that,
(33:13):
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 or almost
certain that dopamine drives at least some of the ADHD symptoms.
(33:35):
It's just because of that, people have made leaps in understanding.
Like there's a there's a long standing myth about people
with ADHD that they do these impulsive behaviors to get
a hit of dopamine. Well, it's based on that old
idea that dopamine is a pleasure producing chemical or reward
producing chemical, where instead it might be that people do
(33:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
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. All right, so we're back, and
(34:45):
we promise talk of social media because I think everyone
it's 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 to various interacting
with veryarious social media platforms is so old, dude. I
know that's great in this case, I love being old.
(35:08):
I don't want any of it.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
I'm with you.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
But in any case, all of that stuff combines to
give you a hit of dopamine. And it's specific and
you know, 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 twenty eighteen. It
(35:30):
was it was a big news item when they were
I don't know, it was like congressional testimony or something.
I can't remember exactly, but there was a VP at
Facebook who came out and was basically like, hey, this
is something we did on purpose and it was a
core foundation. Was the really the quote that kind of
(35:51):
stuck out with how people behave using our platform, like
it was a part of the core strategy to get
p people to come back again and again and again.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Yeah, and that strategy was based on This was a
Chamath Polyhapedia 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 twenty eighteen, that
(36:24):
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,
(36:46):
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 dopemine, we get it. Dopamine hit and so we
learned to come back. And apparently also randomness has a
lot to do with it, because the as we start
(37:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Yeah, totally. There's also this psychiatrist name doctor Cameron s
ep Ah. I guess Sepa is how you said that?
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Sepa or Sepa okay.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
One of those three who came out and said, all right,
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 to catch all term
(38:02):
basically for any sort of addictive behavior like reinforcement. And
you can go on a dopamine fast and like you know,
put that, put that social media app down for a
couple of weeks, and when you come back, it's just
gonna like your brain's gonna have a little rest from
that thing and you're gonna feel amazing about how much
(38:24):
you love it when you come back. And that's not
at all what doctor Cameron was talking about or meant.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
No, huh, Doctor doctor Sipa Seppa was basically saying like
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 gonna take it literally. And
so there was this this movement I think people still
(38:50):
do it, of self denial of everything, from like people
stopped interacting with other people, people stopped eating food they
found pleasurable, they stopped talking if they didn't need to
anything that could conceivably give you a release of dopamine,
and the whole their premise was that if they did that,
(39:13):
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,
(39:37):
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 doctor Sipa
essentially using the wrong term.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
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
(40:10):
app for your happiness.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Yeah, our moms used to call it going to play
outside for a while or summer, I think is another
term it used to be called. 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, you
could really do a good for yourself by taking a
(40:35):
dopamine fast or a break from emotional eating, 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 spreeze, and recreational drugs. But
he also said, you know, anything that you feel like
(40:57):
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 dopamine fast on it,
(41:18):
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 gonna have so
much dopamine that I'm going to be the most motivated, focused,
(41:39):
greatest ux PM of all time. Yeah, and that's just
not how it works, unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
No.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, I guess that's a weird way to end this
whole thing, but that's how it ends.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Huh Yeah, I mean that's our current understanding.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah. I feel like this is one we would be
able to do five years from now, is to kind
of revisit what do you think? Nah?
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Okay, I mean we've never done that.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
That's dopamine as we understand it in twenty twenty four, everybody.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
That sounds good, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
So that sounds good everybody, and that means it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Hey, guys, thank you so much for the episode about conductors.
I squealed with joy when I saw it in my
feed as they started my hour long commute. I teach
high school orchestra and I'm an orchid stroll orchestral excuse me,
a musician with former aspirations of becoming a professional conductor.
So it's fun to hear an outsider's perspective. You're wondering
what exactly is on each musician's stand during a performance.
(43:13):
I love Chuck's analogy of it being like an actors
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,
(43:36):
and I saw other stuff where there were sometimes numeric notations,
and other conductors that 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 as they have the entire score.
They often give entrance cues to specific instrumentalists or sections. Additionally,
(43:59):
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 and a novel.
Experienced musicians can often almost more or less feel their
entrances based on their contextual knowledge of the piece and
(44:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Oh that's cool, it's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
The conductor's facilitator of this process. You hit the nail
on the head, guys, the interpreter of the score. That
is from Brittany Man Chuck.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
We did it.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Tell me they said bravo.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
I didn't see a Bravo.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Sorry, I mean we'll get one someday. Yeah, that's pretty goot.
Who is that from Brittany? Yeah, Brittany, thanks a lot, Brittany,
ciate 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 to send it off
to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You Know.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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