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I prepared a summary to introduce you to this topic:
The crucial brain reward neurotransmitter activated by addictive drugs is dopamine, specifically in the “second-stage” ventral tegmental area to nucleus accumbens link in the brain’s reward circuitry. This has been learned over many decades of research, and is based upon many congruent findings.
When we crave something, it signals our brain’s demand for a substance or action linked to pleasure or alleviation of discomfort. This demand triggers the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine, which stimulates the brain’s reward pathways, creating a compelling urge for the craved item or activity.
Animal studies have shown that when cortisol is released with chronic stress, changes in the brain’s response can lead to lower dopamine levels and increased cravings. Stress has also been associated with increased levels of the hormone ghrelin, again causing stronger cravings.
Today, Crystal methreleases more dopamine in the brain compared to any other drug. Dopamine is a brain neurotransmitter that serves a number of functions, including the feeling of pleasure. When crystal meth leads to a powerful surge of dopamine in the brain, people feel motivated to seek it out again and again.
Additionally, the intensified dopamine response in the brain that mood-altering drugs produce does not naturally stop once the behaviour is initiated or completed (as is the case with natural reward behaviours such as eating or having sex); as a result, cravings for the rewards associated with the drug continue to occur.
Dopamine affects movement, emotion, learning, reward, and executive functions.High levels may result in impulsiveness and aggression, while low levels may lead to tiredness and a lack of motivation.
High dopamine symptoms include anxiety, excessive energy, insomnia, and hallucinations. Low dopamine levels are associated with brain fog, mood swings, and muscle spasms.
When we constantly overstimulate ourselves with things like excessive screen time, gaming, and unhealthy eating, it can lead to issues like addiction and poor mental health. During a dopamine detox, you have to avoid activities like social media, gaming, junk food, and even work.
Engage in Natural Dopamine-Boosting Activities: Physical exercise, meditation, exposure to sunlight, engaging in hobbies, and listening to music can naturally increase dopamine levels. These activities not only help in elevating mood but also in reducing cravings.
Dr. Andrew Huberman discusses the science of addiction, focusing on the role of dopamine to understand why quick rewards make addiction so hard to combat. Dr. Andrew Huberman is a tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine and host of the Huberman Lab podcast.
2 Nov 2023
Dr. Andrew Huberman discusses the dopamine-driven cycle of craving and motivation.
For many people, depression turns out to be one of the most disabling illnesses that we have in society. Despite the treatments that we have available, many people are not responding that well. It’s a disorder that can be very disabling in society. It’s also a disorder that has medical consequences. By understand the neurobiology of depression we hope to be able more to find the right treatment for the patient suffering from this disease.
The current standard of care for the treatment of depression is based on what we call the monoamine deficiency hypothesis. Essentially, presuming that one of three neurotransmitters in the brain is deficient or underactive. But the reality is, there are more than 100 neurotransmitters in the brain. And billions of connections between neurons. So we know that that’s a limited hypothesis.
Neurotransmitters can be thought of as the chemical messengers within the brain, it’s what helps one cell in the brain communicate with another, to pass that message along from one brain region to another. For decades, we thought that the primary pathology, the primary cause of depression was some abnormality in these neurotransmitters, specifically serotonin or norepinephrine. However, norepinephrine and serotonin did not seem to be able to account for this cause, or to cause the symptoms of depression in people who had major depression. Instead, the chemical messengers between the nerve cells in the higher centres of the brain, which include glutamate and GABA, were possibilities as alternative causes for the symptoms of depression.
When you’re exposed to severe and chronic stress like people experience when they have depression, you lose some of the connections between the nerve cells. The communication in these circuits becomes inefficient and noisy, we think that the loss of these synaptic connections contributes to the biology of depression.
There are clear differences between a healthy brain and a depressed brain. And the exciting thing is, when you treat that depression effectively, the brain goes back to looking like a healthy brain, both at the cellular level and at a global scale. It’s critical to understand the neurobiology of depression and how the brain plays a role in that for two main reasons. One, it helps us understand how the disease develops and progresses, and we can start to target treatments based on that.
We are in a new era of psychiatry. This is a paradigm shift, away from a model of monoaminergic deficiency to a fuller understanding of the brain as a complex neurochemical organ. All of the research is driven by the imperative to alleviate human suffering. Depression is one of the most substantial contributors to human suffering. The opportunity to make even a tiny dent in that is an incredible opportunity.
*emotions are controlled by your gut, so make it healthy !!!
*mutualism = something that is beneficial for the two parts involved (bacteria & human mutualism)
Sep 16, 2018
This week’s episode is all about probiotics benefits and myths. The discovery of the microbiome has started off a huge cascade of new research as well as the launch of some questionable health products. I think that the idea that we are covered inside and out by bacteria, with the majority of it being helpful, is pretty mind-blowing.
I decided to make this video because I’ve seen your comments and questions on the subject, usually in the in the form of “how can I improve my gut?” Also, I’ve noticed that my patients have begun taking these supplements to cure everything from a weight gain, to a weakened immune system to acne.
As you probably already know I am a healthy skeptic and believe that just because we see some correlations between disease and good bacteria it is not as simple as putting those bacteria into a capsule. I firmly believe in the next 20-30 years we will unlock some fascinating secrets about our gut that will redefine how we think about our health.
If there’s something that you’re curious about and would like me to explore in a video, please let me know because I take your requests seriously. We’ve got some really great videos coming up in the next few weeks so be sure to subscribe to stay up to date! Love you all!
As state-legalized cannabis spreads, NOVA explores its little-known risks and benefits.
NOVA investigates the story of cannabis from the criminalization that has disproportionately harmed communities of color to the latest medical understanding of the plant. What risks does cannabis pose to the developing brain? How much do we know about its potential medical benefits? As cannabis becomes socially accepted, scientists are exploring its long-term health consequences.
(Premieres Wednesday, September 29 at 9PM ET on PBS.)
This program was produced by GBH, which is solely responsible for its content. Some funders of NOVA also fund basic science research. Experts featured in this film may have received support from funders of this program. Funding for NOVA is provided by the David H. Koch Fund for Science, the NOVA Science Trust, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and PBS viewers.
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The best breathing technique for a panic attack or anxiety, or if you’re feeling overwhelmed, is to slow down your breathing with this calming breathing exercise that helps you relax.
The actual best way to breath during a panic attack involves Capnometry-Assisted Respiratory Training (CART), but this requires a portable capnometer device.
29 Jun 2016 | medskl.com is a global, free open access medical education (FOAMEd) project covering the fundamentals of clinical medicine with animations, lectures and concise summaries. medskl.com is working with over 170 award-winning medical school professors to provide content in 200+ clinical presentations for use in the classroom and for physician CME.
Unlike traditional psychiatry, which rarely looks at the brain, Amen Clinics uses brain imaging technology to identify underlying issues that may be associated with sleep problems.
What are Sleep Disorders?
The importance of quality sleep for the brain and body cannot be overstated. For optimal brain function, emotional well-being, and physical health, adults need 7-9 hours of sleep, teens need 8-10 hours, and younger children need even more. A single sleepless night can lead to fatigue, anxiety, bad moods, and brain fog. People who suffer from insomnia or other sleep disorders (such as sleep apnea) may also struggle with anxiety, depression, addictions, memory problems, dementia, pain, obesity, cardiovascular problems, diabetes, hyperactivity, low sex drive, gastrointestinal problems, and more.
Who is Affected by Sleep Disorders?
An estimated 50-70 million Americans suffer from some form of sleep disorder. Nearly one-third of us suffer from short-term bouts of insomnia, the most common sleep disorder. And chronic insomnia affects approximately 1 in 10 people. The rates are even higher among people with psychiatric disorders. In fact, over 50% of the time, insomnia is tied to stress, anxiety, or depression. Research shows that about 75% of people with depression also have insomnia. From 69 to 99% of people with bipolar disorder experience insomnia or feel a reduced need for sleep during manic episodes. Over half of the people with anxiety have trouble sleeping. And children with ADHD are more likely to experience sleep disorders than kids without the condition.
10 Nov 2016 | UCLA neurologist Alon Avidan, MD, discusses common sleep disorders, including insomnia, hypersomnia, sleep apnea, restless legs, circadian rhythm disorders, narcolepsy, and parasomnia. He also explores the consequences of poor sleep and ways to help you achieve a healthy night’s sleep.
What are the Symptoms of Sleep Disorders?
Signs of sleep disorders include having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, experiencing daytime fatigue, or feeling like you need to take a nap during the day. Other symptoms include anger, irritability, anxiety, depression, lack of concentration, and brain fog.
24 Oct 2020 | You might have heard of insomnia or hypersomnia from symptoms of depression. But have you heard about the other following sleep disorders? Here’s a list of what we cover: sleep related eating disorder, nocturnal driving disorder, somniloquy, sexsomnia, REM sleep behaviour disorder, exploding head syndrome, Kleine-leving syndrome, narcolepsy, nightmare disorder, and restless legs syndrome. Which of these have you personally experienced? Sleep disorders, also known as parasomnias, happen when people are waking up, falling asleep, or sleeping. These disorders vary between people and most don’t remember what they did when they wake up. Sleep disorders can occur during different sleep stages, in all sexes, and in all ages Disclaimer: Do not use this video to self diagnose. If you are experiencing any of these, know that you are not alone.
What Causes Sleep Disorders?
Many things can contribute to occasional sleep disturbances, such as chronic pain, restless leg syndrome, jet lag, medications, hormonal imbalances, depression, exposure to blue light, substance use, aging, and variety of other potential reasons.
Over time, sleep problems can lead to a higher risk of:
20 Sept 2020 | Narcissistic Personality Disorder, otherwise known as NPD is a personality disorder characterized by grandiosity. We may see it in people who have inflated self-esteem with little regard for others. It is important to note that NPD is a psychiatric condition and is more complex than simply being arrogant. The condition causes much distress to the people with it and to the people around them. In this video, we hope to shed some light on the condition, and signs that a person should seek help. Disclaimer: Please do not self-diagnose nor use this to diagnose others. This video is not medical advice, rather, it is for informative purposes only. Please talk to a doctor or mental health professional if you feel you have NPD or any personality disorder.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Unlike traditional psychiatry, which rarely looks at the brain, Amen Clinics uses brain imaging technology to identify brain patterns associated with narcissistic personality disorder and related conditions.
What is Narcissistic Personality Disorder?
Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is considered a type of personality disorder and is characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. Narcissists tend to have grandiose ideas and feel like they superior beings or that they deserve special treatment. Due to their lack of empathy, they can also be manipulative, demanding, and arrogant. The narcissist’s self-centered attitude, sense of entitlement, and inability to understand other people’s feelings leads to trouble at work, at school, and in relationships.
Who Has NPD?
It is estimated that narcissistic personality disorder affects up to 6.2% of the population, and experts suggest the number of narcissists is rising. Approximately 50-75% of those with the disorder are male, and symptoms and signs often emerge during a person’s teens or in young adulthood.
What are the Core Symptoms?
Narcissists may appear to have ample amounts of confidence and high self-esteem, but inside, they may feel insecure or inadequate. In spite of their extreme outward confidence, individuals with NPD often have trouble handling anything perceived as criticism or failure. Narcissistic personality disorder is associated with a wide variety of signs and symptoms, including:
An exaggerated sense of self-importance
A need for excessive and constant admiration
A lack of empathy
Being preoccupied with grandiose fantasies of unlimited success, money, or power
A need to be recognized as superior or special
A sense of entitlement to special treatment
A tendency to exaggerate talents
Manipulation or exploitation of others
A belief that others are envious of them, while deep down being envious of others
An arrogant, haughty, or demanding attitude
June 1 is World Narcissistic Abuse awareness day. Unlike physical abuse, narcissistic abuse leaves emotional and psychological scars. Do you suspect that someone might be a narcissist? Perhaps, a narcissistic friend, narcissistic boyfriend or girlfriend, or even a narcissistic parent. If you suspect that you yourself or someone you know might be narcissist, here are some signs to watch out for. The vision of psych2go is to bring awareness to our own behaviour and behaviours of others so that we can all grow together. If you suspect that you might be a narcissist or someone close to you is, you can use the insights from these videos to help them or yourself. Also as a disclaimer: A narcissist is not the same as someone diagnosed with Narcissistic personality disorder. Someone with NPD would have to be officially diagnosed by a professional whereas a narcissist is more a layperson term for someone who shows the behaviour and tendency of someone who may or may not suffer from NPD. Also, do not use this video to completely diagnose yourself or others. Use it for insights only.
What Causes It?
Narcissistic personality disorder is actually a brain disorder. Brain imaging completely changes the way we think about personality. It is easy to label people as arrogant, demanding, manipulative, or uncaring. And diagnosing someone with a personality disorder, such as NPD, suggests their personality or character is a problem. But what is the organ of personality? It’s the brain. If someone has an unstable personality, their brain may be the cause.
People with NPD frequently have co-existing mental health disorders, such as:
Anxiety
Depression
Bipolar disorder
Eating disorders
Abusive behaviours
Substance abuse
Attention deficit disorder
Suicidal thoughts and behaviour
23 Feb 2016
Narcissism isn’t just a personality type that shows up in advice columns; it’s actually a set of traits classified and studied by psychologists. But what causes it?
And can narcissists improve on their negative traits? W. Keith Campbell describes the psychology behind the elevated and sometimes detrimental self-involvement of narcissists.
Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University who runs the Huberman Lab, which studies how the brain functions, how it changes through experiences, and how to repair the brain after injury or disease. In his career, Andrew has made many important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain plasticity, and neural regeneration, and repair.
He’s received numerous awards and recognitions for his research and publications, including the McKnight Foundation Neuroscience Scholar Award, the Biomedical Scholar Award from the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Cogan Award for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology.
In addition to being a tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University, Dr. Andrew is a brilliant neuroscientist and teacher — he excellently explains complicated concepts in a way that everyday people can understand them and use neuroscience to improve their lives!
Andrew’s goal is to understand how the brain allows us to sense, evaluate, and respond to the world around us. He’s actively working on methods to re-wire and repair eye-to-brain connections for people who suffer from blinding diseases, as well as investigating emotions and how they drive human behavior.
Dr. Andrew is clearly an expert on how the human brain works — I can’t wait for him to share his wisdom with you today!
Listening Comprehension Activity: Advanced Level 1- Watch the video and try understanding the general idea 2- take notes 3- complete the missing words in the transcript 4- correct your activity
Sam Harris describes the properties of consciousness and how mindfulness practices of all stripes can be used to transcend one’s ego.
Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Mr. Harris’ writing has been published in over ten languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and holds a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, where he studied the neural basis of belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is also a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason.
TRANSCRIPT Sam Harris:
What one of the problems we have in discussing consciousness scientifically is that consciousness is irreducibly subjective. This is a point that many philosophers have made – Thomas Nagel, John Searle, David Chalmers. While I don’t agree with everything they’ve said about consciousness I agree with them on this point that consciousness is what it’s like to be you. If there’s an experiential internal qualitative dimension to any physical system then that is consciousness. And we can’t reduce the experiential side to talk of information processing and neurotransmitters and states of the brain in our case because – and people want to do this.
Someone like Francis Crick said famously you’re nothing but a pack of neurons. And that misses the fact that half of the reality we’re talking about is the qualitative experiential side. So when you’re trying to study human consciousness, for instance, by looking at states of the brain, all you can do is correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become that never gives you license to throw out the first person experiential side. That would be analogous to saying that if you just flipped a coin long enough you would realize it had only one side. And now it’s true you can be committed to talking about just one side. You can say that heads being up is just a case of tails being down. But that doesn’t actually reduce one side of reality to the other. And to give you a more precise example, we have very strong third person “objective measures” of things like anxiety and fear at this moment. You bring someone into the lab, they say they’re feeling fear.
You can scan their brains with FMRI and see that their amygdala response is heightened. You can measure the sweat on their palms and see that there’s an increased galvanic skin response. You can check their blood cortisol and see that its spiking. So these now are considered objective third person measures of fear. But if half the people came into the lab tomorrow and said they were feeling fear and showed none of these signs and they said they were completely calm when their cortisol spiked and when their palms started to sweat, these objective measures would no longer be reliable measures of fear. So the cash value of a change in physiology is still a change in the first person conscious side of things. And we’re inevitably going to rely on people’s subjective reports to understand whether our correlations are accurate. So the hope that we are going to talk about consciousness shorn of any kind of qualitative internal experiential language, I think, is a false one.
So we have to understand both sides of it subjective – classically subjective and objective. I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion.
The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuro-anatomical sense. There’s no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. We know that everything you experience – your conscious emotions and thoughts and moods and the impulses that initiate behaviour – all of these things are delivered by a myriad of different processes in the brain that are spread out over the whole of the brain. They can be independently erupted. We have a changing system. We are a process and there’s not one unitary self that’s carried through from one moment to the next unchanging.
And yet we feel that we have this self that’s just this centre of experience. Now it’s possible I claim and people have claimed for thousands of years to lose this feeling, to actually have the centre drop out of the experience so that you just rather than feeling like you’re on this side of things looking in as though you’re almost looking over your own shoulder appropriating experience in each moment, you can just be identical to this sphere of experience that is all of the color and light and feeling and energy of consciousness. But there’s no sense of centre there. So this is classically described as self- transcendence or ego transcendence in spiritual, mystical, new age religious literature. It is in large measure the baby in the bathwater that religious people are afraid to throw out. It’s – if you want to take seriously the project of being like Jesus or Buddha or some, you know, whatever your favourite contemplative is, self-transcendence really is at the core of the phenomenology that is described there. And what I’m saying is that it’s a real experience.
It’s clearly an experience that people can have. And while it tells you nothing about the cosmos, it tells you nothing about what happened before the Big Bang. It tells you nothing about the divine origin of certain books. It doesn’t make religious dogmas any more plausible. It does tell you something about the nature of human consciousness. It tells you something about the possibilities of experience but then again any experience does. You can – there’s just – people have extraordinary experiences. And the problem with religion is that they extrapolate – people extrapolate from those experiences and make grandiose claims about the nature of the universe. But these experiences do entitle you to talk about the nature of human consciousness and it just so happens that this experience of self-transcendence does link up with what we know about the mind through neuroscience to form a plausible connection between science and classic mysticism, classic spirituality. Because if you lose your sense of a unitary self – if you lose your sense that there’s a permanent unchanging centre to consciousness, your experience of the world actually becomes more faithful to the facts. It’s not a distortion of the way we think things are at the level of the brain. It’s actually – it brings your experience into closer register with how we think things are.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Elizabeth Rodd, and Dillon Fitton
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