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for 27% off site wide. That's helixleap.com slash breakdown for 27% off site wide. helixleap.com slash breakdown. Shhh. Hi, I'm Maya Beallik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to part two of our conversation with Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin. He's a Russian-born neuroscientist. His degrees are from St. Petersburg State University, Oxford University, and he did his post-doctoral training at Harvard. We talk about his book, One Hand Clapping, and part one of our conversation with Dr. Kukushkin, explored so many different aspects of evolution, intelligence that we can find in every aspect of our life. We talk about his research into sea slugs. What can we learn from sea slugs about memory? Part one is great. Part two is going to explore AI as part of our evolutionary path. What technology can't provide that real experiences can? And what are the implications of the friendships that so many people are forming with non-human synthetic robots, what does it mean for love?

Stick around to the end where Mime and I get into a heated and somewhat hilarious outro. We really hope you enjoy part two of this episode. And without further ado, here's part two of our conversation with Nikolika Kushkin. Break it down. I want to talk a little bit more about dopamine because you give it kind of its its own glorious moment in one hand clapping. And what you kind of talk about, and this kind of goes back to the carbon oxygen conversation. And I really love, and this is the, this winds its way through everything that you talk about in the book, which is every organic relationship that exists is giving us information about a much larger purpose, right? So when you talk about the cortex versus, you know, the dopaminergic reward system, what you set up is that there's a cognitive and an emotional component of us, but it's always gonna be competing against a system that is wired for like sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The dopamine system is always going to say like, more, yes, good, we don't care about her, him, or the time. That's the dopamine system and it's being balanced by this cortical system. So again, in the same way that you talk about, you know, the DNA RNA protein relationship, the carbon oxygen relationship, there's these larger patterns that are built in to even this system. I want you to talk about dopamine, though, because the example that you give is, for example, if you give all of your dopamine to social media, there's simply not going to be a lot left over and you will then have to keep chasing it. If you go to a party and you have a great time and you're up till four, chances are you can't do that again the next day because the system's going to need to recalibrate. As we get older, this becomes more evident. Talk a little bit about the strength of the dopamine pull and what it tells us really about also our human experience. Well, so what I'm always interested in is what does dopamine mean from the perspective of nature? What does nature put into this molecule? What is it there for? What does it actually do? And it's not an easy question. Even though dopamine, I think it's one case where this chemical has really entered the popular vernacular, people refer to it when they talk about their mental states. I think really this probably is the future of neuroscience. So in the future of not just neuroscience, but our culture, I think that in the future, we will have that come from the bottom up that defy in our mental states, emotions, memories from what is actually happening in the brain. And dopamine might be the first instance when that is sort of beginning to happen. But the way that people understand dopamine is wrong. People think of dopamine as a pleasure molecule, a pleasure chemical. It's an easy narrative. You do something, you get a pleasure chemical because you did it, you want more pleasure, you repeat the thing. But that's very neat and easy to understand. The problem is that dopamine doesn't actually cause pleasure. So, Adderol would be one way to get more dopamine. People who take Adderol for ADHD, for example, They get get more focused they get in the zone more they work harder for their goal same would be true for or at but they don't experience euphoria is it's not that suddenly you know everything is incredible in their life and it's just pure joy that's not that's not what happens so this molecule doesn't cause pleasure And it becomes not clear. Okay, if it doesn't cause pleasure, why are we chasing this dopamine? What is that draws us to it? And what I arrive at in the book is that dopamine is not actually what our brain wants. Ironically, it's what it's what the brain wants to get rid of. But it gets it every time there is something unexpectedly good. And this dopamine basically tells the brain why is this good thing unexpected? Why is that a surprise? Go and figure out why this is a surprise so that it's not surprising anymore. So I can get access to it anytime I want. So whatever that good thing you found, I have access to it all the time. That's what dopamine does. It's a figure it out signal rather than a pleasure signal. It makes you work harder to get that reward anytime. That's what motivates us. So one great way to understand this is classic experiments by BF Skinner on Pigeons. So these pigeons, they also have the dopamine system just like us even though their brains are a little different. Since then it's been replicated in other animals too, so it's not specific to pigeons. It's just that was the classic organism in which these experiments have been done. So what you can do with these pigeons is you can put a button in their cage and make them pick that button to open a reward. Yeah, pick, pick, pick, pick. And you can set the number of picks that they need to make to get the reward. So say you set it to 50. That's a lot of work. They pick and they pick and they pick, they open the reward, they get tired. They walk around, they eat the reward. Eventually they come back to the button, start picking it again. If you make this number of pecs, if you set it to 100, that's even more work. When they're done with that, they get even more tired. They spend more time relaxing, resting before they reluctantly get back to that button. So the longer the more effort you put into that button, the more time they will be tired. But if you make that number unpredictable, if you randomize how many times the pigeon needs to pick the button to get the reward, then it doesn't stop. Just keeps picking and picking and picking and picking and picking nonstop without any rest faster than any pigeon with hundred or fifty pecs per button.

So it's not the reward per se that motivates pigeons. You would think that well the fifty peck pigeon knows how to get the reward. It can always get it. It wasn't motivated to get it. It's a snot the reward that motivates the pigeon is the unpredictability. It's trying to figure out the pattern. I was trying to figure out what do I need to do to get it.

It sounds more like dating than social media.

It sounds more like dating than social media. It sounds like love It sounds like if I'm in a relationship and I don't know if I'm actually gonna get the goodies I'm gonna stay I'm gonna keep going back no matter what because one time I might get something more than crumbs and gambling and in any even really any motivation. We are drawn to unpredictability when everything is predictable. Our brains rest. They don't do anything. It's only this unpredictability that draws us to do anything. Chaos is addictive. Yeah. Chaos is a very good way to put it. Chaos is addictive and order is just absence of motion. If everything is perfectly predictable and orderly, then there's nothing to do. You can't remove dopamine from a brain that can be done in a mouse and if you watch those mice creepy. It's not that they're they can move they can you know if you hold them on the finger they hold onto your finger if you put food in their mouth they chew it so they have reflexes no problem but you put that mouse in a arena without opening it's genetically removed and it just sits there just sits motionless doesn't doesn't even flick its tail. It's really creepy and then you put a food next to it and it's hungry. You know that it's hungry. You haven't fed it for a while, but I won't move towards the food. It's right there, but I won't do anything. If you put it in a smile, then it will start chewing once the reflex is key again, and then it will start doing something. But basically anything we do on top of basic reflexes

is motivated by dopamine. If we don't have dopamine, we just stall. It's kind of a thing to talk about a dopamine fast or people start talking about like, oh, social media, it's this dopamine hit and it's like the word that parents are told to say to their children, you're gonna run out of all your dopamine. What is actually happening? What are we talking about when we talk about this colloquially?

Well, I think that that's a very useful way to think about this because dopamine is, it's a finite resource. There's a certain amount of it that your cells produce per unit of time and you can run low on that dopamine and you would need to wait until it balances back in. Your sensitivity to that dopamine can go down. The quantity of dopamine can go down. Those are all flexible things that can be adjusted in the brain. And I think it's very useful just on a practical level to think about it like a finite resource, like a salary. Think of it as a salary. You only get this much dopamine per day, per week, per month. And you can decide how to distribute it. What you have to keep in mind is that you need that dopamine to motivate yourself. But you're also spend it anytime something unexpectedly good happens. That's just how it's wired. You can go around that. You will spend that dopamine whenever you have a big good surprise. So you have to balance those two things. You have to save enough dopamine to be motivated. If you spend it all, then everything will seem boring and you will just be kind of low on energy. But you also need to have some exciting things in your life. And so if you balance those things, maybe sometimes avoid exciting things. Maybe you have a quiet week and then you know, you can have a big party and you'll enjoy it even more. Sometimes it's good to throw your dopamine in one big wedding or something and just prepare to be a little bit low on dopamine for the next couple of days. I think if you're aware of that, it gives you a lot more control over it. I'm thinking of the pig jumping on the trampoline with a chicken on its back that I saw on social media.

And it... I think if you're aware of that, it gives you a lot more control over it. I'm thinking of the pig jumping on the trampoline with a chicken on its back that I saw on social media and it brought me so much joy and I'm also like, what? I'm a human on a planet hurling through space and I'm looking at a screen with an AI-generated pig with a chicken on its back jumping on a trampoline. Like is this what God placed me here for right now is to share this with my boyfriend? And I bet that that emotion, I bet that that moment has made you open up social media a couple of times more. Because maybe I'll see a different pig on a trampoline. Maybe I'll see a cow on a trampoline. Social media fundamentally unpredictable. They are built in such a way to maximize unpredictability.

You don't know what's going to be posted, you don't know what funny thing you'll see, you don't know who'll react to your post, how many likes you will get, you don't know when the likes will come. I mean, that's deliberate. The likes arrive at random times. If you picture a situation in which your likes all arrive at the same time, once a week, You get your own like time.

That would be very disappointing and very frustrating. Everybody would hate it.

This is the first time in human history that we have been exposed to this number of ways to be surprised. Constantly. I would imagine that our systems are not geared up to be able to defend against us. I absolutely agree with that. I think about what used to be funny when I was in high

school and in college and before you know brought by the internet, we'll just gather around and tell jokes to each other and like really really laugh at that. It was really funny and I cannot possibly imagine that something like that would be funny anymore like the standards of what but Joltsu out of a state of boredom have grown exponentially.

Now you need an AI generated video of a pig to to to get you out of that state of boredom. Now the stakes are continuing to grow. I think yes, we are getting saturated with surprising information. We're also getting saturated with information in general. I think that our memory was not meant to internalize this much information per day, just completely saturated with these bright flashing lights that stick into our memory. I think that our memory doesn't work like a computer memory, we don't run out of off-memory when we hit 100% and you can't create new memory. I think that our memory doesn't work like a computer memory, we don't run out of off memory when we hit 100% and you can't create new memory. But I do think that we constantly hover on 99% of memory capacity and having to rewrite some of the things that we've memorized with new information. That's why everything seems so flat. It's all the information that we all the memories that we form kind of feel like this soup, where all the important things are blended with unimportant things and politics are blended with funny videos and it's hard to distinguish what is really important and what is just soup of information. So we're getting too much information. One time when human brain does become saturated with memory is sleep deprivation. That's one example where you're not balancing this acquisition of information during the day with forgetting at night. That's what needs to happen for you to maintain memory capacity. So if people don't sleep for a very long time, for weeks, for 10 days, they start seeing hallucinations. Basically, all the pathways within the brain and all the connections between neurons become so saturated that everything blends together. Information just kind of goes in all direction. You can't distinguish what's imagination, what's memory, what's reality. So I think that's maybe not in quite such an extreme form, but I think that's where we are as a culture. We are so saturated with information that our synaptic connections are at their maximum power and we don't remove, we don't prune that enough to distinguish what really matters from what doesn't matter. My ambi-Alex breakdown is supported by by optimizers. I struggled to get good quality sleep and I just thought like, ugh, it's stress, but I learned during perimenopause and menopause, your hormones shift and it affects your magnesium levels. Low magnesium makes everything harder, not just sleep, but focus, mood, stress tolerance. That's why we added magnesium breakthrough by bioptimizers to our nightly routine.

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