A letter landed on Masud Husain’s desk about a man in his thirties who had stopped doing anything at all.
David had been highly productive, worked in finance, and was charming company. Then he lost his job, stopped showering, and could not be bothered to claim the benefits that would have covered his rent. Asked why he no longer listened to music, he said it would take five minutes to connect the cables.
Dr. Masud Husain is a clinical neurologist, neuroscientist, and Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Brain and author of Our Brains, Our Selves, winner of the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.
David was not depressed. He had suffered two tiny strokes in the basal ganglia, the structures deep in the brain that connect what we want to what we do. Nothing was worth the effort to him anymore.
Masud’s team started him on a drug that acts on the dopamine system. Three months later David came back with a haircut, a suit, a new job, and a new girlfriend.
Addiction researchers had arrived at that same circuit from the other direction, as the one nearly every addictive drug hijacks. Masud and Mike get into what that overlap means about the science of motivation, why apathy and depression are different conditions, what over two hundred causes of dementia means for prevention, and whether there is a self to be found in the brain at all.
This is a conversation for anyone who has decided to do something and then not done it. Masud frames motivation as a calculation of whether the reward is worth the effort, so the way through is to make the effort smaller and leave the cue somewhere you will trip over it.
In this conversation, you’ll learn:
- What motivation actually is, and the calculation your brain runs before you act
- Why apathy and depression are different conditions
- The case of David, and what two tiny strokes revealed about the basal ganglia
- Why the most apathetic students showed the most brain activity, not the least
- How to shrink the activation hill so that you start
- Wanting and liking, and why the dopamine detox story does not hold up
- What over two hundred causes of dementia means for how you think about prevention
- Purpose, curiosity, and social connection, and where they sit alongside the physical factors
After thirty years of seeing patients, the thing Masud says he has learned is that the self is not set in stone. You can change.
Enjoy the conversation.
“For me, the critical thing is that the self is not set in stone. Your personal identity is not set in stone. You can change. That’s the most important thing I think I’ve learned.” — Dr. Masud Husain
Resources + Links
Dr. Masud Husain’s Website: masudhusain.org
Dr. Masud Husain’s Books: Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist’s Patients Taught Him About the Brain, Oxford Textbook of Cognitive Neurology and Dementia (co-editor)
Dr. Masud Husain’s Journal: Brain, where he is Editor-in-Chief
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