This is an ABC podcast.

We live in an age of unprecedented abundance.

There are more things to become addicted to, more chances for addiction to blossom than ever before.

Hey, you're listening to All In The Mind. I'm Sonika Adar.

A few weeks ago, as part of National Science Week and the Sydney Science Festival,

I hosted a discussion with Stanford University Professor of Psychiatry, Dr. Anna Lemke.

It was recorded at the UNSW Center for Ideas,

and we're going to play a cut-down version of that chat for you today.

Now, we've had Dr. Lemke on the show previously, in fact, just last year, but addiction is

such a rich and troubling topic of discussion that we had plenty of new ground to cover in this chat.

In fact, the only real overlap is when Dr. Lemke describes the relationship

between pleasure, pain, dopamine, and addiction in the brain. Now, one thing we didn't discuss

in our previous episode featuring Dr. Lemke was her personal story of addiction, which she

discusses in her book, Dopamine Nation, finding balance in the age of

indulgence.

So I started this chat by asking her to share her story.

Well, it's always a little embarrassing as these things are.

In my early 40s, I did develop a kind of compulsive attachment, which I think you could

fairly call a mild addiction to romance novels. So it started with the Twilight Saga. You might think

of the Twilight Saga as my gateway drug.

And then I got a Kindle, which was akin to my hypodermic syringe.

And it escalated from there over the course of about two years to what I consider to be a kind of socially sanctioned addiction to erotica or, you know, pornography for women, if I could phrase it like that.

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