Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a biweekly podcast from the American Psychological Association.

I'm your host, Caitlin Luna. The topic for this episode is dopamine. It's known as the chemical

of love, sex, creativity, and addiction. Dopamine always wants more.

It pushes us to achieve greatness, but can also lead to our downfall.

Our guests for this episode are Dr. Dan Lieberman, Professor and Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs

and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the George Washington University, and Mike Long,

a speechwriter, screenwriter and playwright who teaches writing at Georgetown University. They co-wrote

a book called The Molecule of Moore, How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, Creativity,

and will determine the fate of the human race. Welcome, Dr. Lieberman and Mr. Long. Thank you.

Happy to have you on the show. Yeah. So I'm sure many of our listeners have heard of dopamine,

but may not know exactly what it is and exactly what it does. So Dr. Lieberman, can you start

off with a very basic question? What exactly is dopamine? Dopamine's a chemical in the brain.

I like to think of it like the conductor of an orchestra.

It turns on, turns off, turns up the volume, turns down the volume on a lot of different areas in the brain.

And as a result, it has an outside, an outsized influence on our behavior.

Everything in our body serves a purpose.

So from evolutionary perspective, why does dopamine exist in our brains and are we the only

animals who have dopamine?

When people think about dopamine, they often think about reward.

And that is an important aspect of it.

We get feelings of pleasure, reinforcement, even euphoria when we do things that promote our survival and our reproduction,

eating food, drinking water, winning competitions, and having sex. So from an evolutionary point of

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