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You wrote one of the most iconic, well-known books about dopamine, which propelled the subject matter of dopamine into the public consciousness.

But I guess the most important question I should ask you is, why does dopamine matter?

Ah, good question, good place to start.

I mean, dopamine matters because it's fundamental to our survival,

right? So it's the chemical that we make in our brain that tells us this is something we should

approach, explore, investigate. So it's really almost the survival chemical. So what is dopamine?

If you had to explain it to a 10-year-old, how would you go about explaining it?

So dopamine is a chemical that we make in our brain.

It has many different functions, but one of its most important functions is that it helps us

experience pleasure, reward, and motivation. It may

be even more important for the motivation to do things than it is for the pleasure itself.

So for example, there's a very famous experiment in which rats were engineered to have

no dopamine in the brain's reward pathway.

And the scientists discovered that if they put food in the rat's mouth, the rat would eat the food,

would seem to get some pleasure from the food, if you can determine that from watching a rat eat,

...