Wanting vs Liking: Why Addiction Isn't About Pleasure | Dr. Kent Berridge

Dr. Kent Berridge, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, spent his early career believing that dopamine was the brain's pleasure chemical. He was wrong. His research instead revealed a fundamental split between wanting and liking — two distinct psychological processes that are often conflated but are governed by separate neural systems. This distinction, known as the Incentive Sensitization theory, explains why people can compulsively chase drugs, food, or behaviors long after they stop enjoying them. The conversation with host (a recovering addict who has treated thousands) grounds the science in lived experience, clarifying why relapse is not a failure of will but a feature of a sensitized brain.

The Wanting-Liking Gap

Berridge explains that the field once assumed a single "brain reward system" centered on dopamine, which produced both wanting and liking. His experiments with rats told a different story. When he suppressed dopamine, rats still showed positive "liking" reactions to sugar (facial expressions of pleasure) but stopped working for food. When he stimulated dopamine, rats ate eight times more than normal but showed no increase in pleasure — in fact, they showed slight disgust. They wanted intensely but didn't like more.