“Dopamine Nation” by Anna Lembke

This is a popular science book about neuroscience – an evolving area of study that gets more and more interesting to read about all the time. The focus here is on the neuro-transmitter called dopamine which – to put it crudely – gets released in the brain in response to things which make us feel good. It causes us to sense pleasure and reward. The following quotation sums up its potential power:

“For a rat in a box, chocolate increases the basal output of dopamine by 55%, sex by 100%, nicotine by 150% and cocaine by 225%. Amphetamine, the active ingredient in the street drugs ‘speed’, ‘ice’ and ‘shabu’ as well as medications like Adderall that are used to treat attention deficit disorder, increases the release of dopamine by 1000%. By this accounting, one hit off a meth pipe is equal to ten orgasms.”

Unsurprisingly, therefore, its capacity to give us ‘highs’ makes it easy to get addicted to the things which cause its release. Gambling addictions, for example, are discussed in this book, and explained in these terms. Addicts know that 90% they will lose money, but the size of the dopamine hit they get when they do on rare occasions win big, keeps them spending recklessly.

The book is subtitled ‘why our addiction to pleasure is causing us pain’, and this reflects its major purpose which is to suggest that for may of us contemporary life is so cossetted from real, lasting unpleasantness, that we have simply become accustomed to living a pleasurable existence. As a result, our neurotransmitters are all out of synch, making it harder and harder for us to cope with pain when it comes our way.

The book is an easy read and is consistently thought-provoking. Anna Lembke is a consultant psychiatrist, so knows what she is talking about, but perhaps sometimes dwells a bit too much on the details of patients whose addictions are unusual or extreme. She also bravely uses herself as a case study at points, but I failed to see really how her self-confessed addiction to reading romance novels should really be seen as any kind of a problem. Surely completely harmless like all reading addictions!