This is a mini video lecture about the Reward System of the brain, inspired by the book Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke and my time living in Bangkok where I was surrounded by the omnipresent Buddhist symbols in the city full of desire.
It explains the 1954 experiment by James Olds and Peter Milner that lead to the discovery of Dopamine - the pleasure molecule, with my comment connecting the delicate "sea-saw" balance of dopamine to the Buddhist view of controlling one's desire.
In the experiment, mice with electrodes implanted in their brains were found to press a lever connected to electrical stimulation in order to receive tiny jolts of current. Some even pressed the lever up to 2000 times per hour. These were the ones with implants in the septum and nucleus accumbens areas, which are associated with the experience of pleasure through feeding, sex and addiction etc.
Are we in control of this "lever" stimulating the brain? Maybe if we just take a moment to sit still, current will flow on its own.
Perhaps, perhaps.... we don't even need to press it at all, things will just - flow.
A re-enactment of the discovery of self-stimulation in 1954 (source: McGill University)
