[Book Sip] Finding Balance in the Era of Excess Pleasure 'Dopamination'

Some sentences encapsulate the entire content of the book itself, while others instantly reach the reader's heart and create a connection with the book. We introduce such meaningful sentences excerpted from the book. - Editor's note

The author finds the reason why humans fall into addiction not in a lack of willpower or morality, but in dopamine, the neurotransmitter that governs pleasure and pain. She also argues that due to the reality where addictive substances, capitalism, and digital technology are combined, addiction is no longer an individual problem but a problem for everyone, and should be viewed from the perspective of society as a whole. The author of this book, Dr. Anna Lembke, is a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and a psychiatrist leading the Stanford Addiction Treatment Center. She participates in shaping healthcare policies for the U.S. administration and Congress and has published over 100 articles and papers. However, unlike her elite career path, she confesses in this book that she has suffered from depression since childhood and was once addicted to erotic novels even after becoming a doctor. In short, she is both an 'expert' and a 'whistleblower' on addiction. This book presents a new perspective on humans, the brain, addiction, and recovery through the latest brain science and neuroscience research, as well as tens of thousands of clinical cases she has encountered over 20 years.

Neuroscientists discovered, along with the discovery of dopamine, that pleasure and pain are processed in the same area of the brain and function through a mechanism of opposition. Simply put, pleasure and pain act like weights placed on opposite sides of a scale. Imagine a scale in our brain with a fulcrum in the middle. When there is nothing on the scale, it is level with the ground. When we experience pleasure, dopamine is secreted in our reward pathway, and the scale tips toward the pleasure side. The more and faster our scale tips, the more pleasure we feel.

How does the desire triggered by a cue move our pleasure-pain scale? The scale tips toward pleasure in anticipation of a future reward (a slight increase in dopamine), but soon after, due to the aftermath of the cue, it tips toward pain (a slight dopamine deficiency). When dopamine is deficient, our brain induces behavior to seek the addictive target.

Dopamine Nation | Written by Anna Lembke | Translated by Kim Du-wan | Heurim Publishing | 316 pages | 18,000 KRW