Rewind: The Role of Dopamine in Habit Formation and Compulsive Behavior with Talia Lerner, PhD

We're resharing an episode from October 2022. How are habits – both good and bad – formed in the brain, and what role do habits play in diseases of the brain? These are some of the questions neuroscientist , Talia Lerner , PhD, is investigating in her lab . Her recent study, published in Cell Reports , may change the overall understanding of how habits are formed and could be broken . Since this episode was first recorded in fall 2022, Lerner's team has published new research looking at sex differences. In a paper in Neuropsychopharmacology , her team discovered how novel sex-specific mechanisms control how stress hormones impact dopamine transmission and motivation.

You can listen to Rewind: The Role of Dopamine in Habit Formation and Compulsive Behavior with Talia Lerner, PhD online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Rewind: The Role of Dopamine in Habit Formation and Compulsive Behavior with Talia Lerner, PhD is an episode from Breakthroughs by Feinberg School of Medicine.

This episode is 22:54 long.

This episode was published on Aug 25, 2025.

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