An Ancient Brain in a Modern World: Addiction Isn't About Willpower

Send us Fan Mail Read the article on Substack Here's where our modern predicament becomes clear: we've engineered a world flooded with what scientists call "super stimuli." These aren't the natural rewards our ancestors encountered. They're concentrated, intensified, and deliberately designed to hijack our ancient wiring. Anna Lembke, author of "Dopamine Nation" and another Stanford psychiatry professor, explains that our reward pathways have been "conserved over millions of years of evolutio...