Andrew Huberman
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2023
2:02:32 · 3M views · Aug 16, 2021
Andrew Huberman interviews Stanford addiction psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke about the biology and psychology of addiction to drugs, food, gambling, screens and more. They discuss dopamine, the opioid crisis, and her book Dopamine Nation.
HN people send it to others in addiction and digital-habits threads as an expert explanation of dopamine baselines.
4 comments from Hacker News
"Dopamine reset" refers to resetting your baseline levels of dopamine. Highly recommend listening to Huberman's interview of Dr. Anna Lembke: this video As well as her book, Dopamine Nation: [LINK] Frequent, large spikes in dopamine, like those people get from drugs and to a lesser extent Twitter, can both lower your baseline and also make other activities seem uninteresting. They often lead to addiction, which is the primary example of people feeling low dopamine baselines and chasing high spikes.
> I doubt the author's thirst for knowledge genuinely borders on 'compulsion or even addiction'. That's ridiculous self-aggrandizement I think there might be more to this than it seems at first glance. For many people, work is their addiction. Others, the acquisition of knowledge. Others still, Tik-Tok and social media. Less ideally, heroin and hard drugs. I recently listened to an episode of Andrew Huberman's podcast focused on addiction [0]. He interviews Dr. Anna Lembke, an addiction expert, and they explore aspects of addiction that aren't necessarily well understood by outsiders. The thing that stood out to me was their acknowledgement that most of us are addicted to something, even if we don't look at that thing as an "addiction". Some of us are addicted to things that are accepted by society, and some of us have addictions that are maladaptive. The mechanisms behind those addictions are often similar, even if the outcomes are quite different. I'm not making any comments about the TikTok format itself here, or his claims that one must be addicted to have the drive to follow through on learning. But the idea that the author himself is addicted, and that some people do experience information/learning in this way does not seem very far fetched. The concern I have is with embracing the format. As we learn more and more about the addictiveness of social media and as our attention spans continue to shrink, I don't think embracing the format is a wise choice. But I totally bel
> I'm simply incapable of doing things I've set out to do. Simple things. Everything is difficult. “Independent discharges of dopamine neurons (tonic or pacemaker firing) determine the motivation to respond to such cues. As a result of habitual intake of addictive drugs, dopamine receptors expressed in the brain are decreased, thereby reducing interest in activities not already stamped in by habitual rewards. ” From: Dopamine and Addiction | Annual Review of Psychology — [LINK] ---- Edit: I'd like to add a couple more ideas, because what you're describing in your article is spot on, and I believe can be generalized past your own experience. > Another angle that makes this ever more distressing is that my memory is very, very fallible ... I can confidently say that I've done nothing I said I would do there.” Herbert Simon says: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. As an information-addict myself, I've been meditating a lot about this topic. During the past two years I've been researching it from a psychological perspective (And for that, I'm grateful to @ericd for this HN comment: [LINK] ). I'll throw in some resources that I've came across during this journey, in case anyone finds them useful: - Dr Gabor Mate: Addict
Poor people have more 45% more leisure time than wealthy. Society as a whole has more leisure time than any time of history before. We still bitch day after day, minute after minute. source... this video