“How Drugs Steal Your Ability to Learn” :- Dr. Anna Lembke #stopdrugs #stopdrugaddiction #story

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Another really interesting study is if you um expose a rat to a single injection of cocaine and then slice open its brain, you'll see this arborization of dopamine releasing neurons in the reward pathway. So that means a proliferation of uh neurons that release dopamine, a kind of growth of the dopamine forest, so to speak. But by the way, you'll see that same arborization or growth of dopamine releasing neurons if you put a rat in a complex maze, right? which is to say a maze where they can explore and find different things and have challenges. If you then cut that rat's brain open, you'll see that same arborization of dopamine. So, in other words, learning is highly rewarding and dopamine is released in response to novelty and new things and new challenges. But if you then take that rat and pre-treat it with methamphetamine and put it in the maze and then look at its brain, you don't see any additional arborization beyond what you got with methamphetamine.

[00:01:03]And the interpretation there is that drugs actually may usurp or steal our ability to learn, right? because they've again this idea of sort of they've taken over. It's such a powerful dominant stimulus that there's no additional growth or neuroplasticity in response to something like learning a maze.