June 30, 2015 • 35 mins
What is addiction? Why are some people predisposed to it and what happens in the brain when addiction takes hold? In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie break it all down for you and ponder the addiction-shattered brain.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome the Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. And hey, it's summer. People
are on break. Uh, So we thought we'd rerun a
couple of episodes that we're really proud of that I
think has a lot of really insightful information about addiction.
(00:26):
So without further ado, let's dive into the science of addiction.
Julie has returned to us from New York City once more.
It's true, you have returned from Laryngitisville. Yes, yes, for
the most part. Yeah, yeah, you're there. Um. Yes. When
(00:47):
I was in New York, I attended the World Science Festival,
which if you guys have never heard about it, you
should immediately well after this episode check it out because
they have some online offerings that are wonderful. Like when
I was there, I checked out this panel on something
called the craving brain. And that's what we're going to
talk about today, this idea of what addiction is and
(01:07):
what it is not. So it's it's about the craving brain,
not craving brains. Not that. Yeah. No zombie content, as
far as I know, is going to tumble forth from
our lips today because it's my understanding, if you showed
up for this, uh, this talk expecting a light hireded
discussion about zombies, you would have been pretty disappointed. And
so that's what we're discussing in this episode. Addiction, the
(01:28):
science of addiction and uh and it's it's really fascinating
this topic because for me, I had not really looked
into it. Before I had, I wouldn't say this just
a surface level understanding of addiction, Like I was pretty
to some of the science and some of the the
levels of deeper understanding involved in addiction research. But but
(01:49):
still it's so misunderstood at large in our culture even today. Yeah,
and I feel like we are only now getting a
baseline understanding of it. And a lot of that has
to do with the in itself. We talked about this
all the time, like we still don't know exactly how
the brain works, and we have more of a clue
now than we did a hundred years ago or even
twenty years ago. Um, But the fact of the matter
(02:10):
that addiction at large is still going to be something
that we can't fully cover in depth, and in fact,
for us to do that, we would just have to
become the addiction podcast, so we could really um give
it its due day to talk about every single aspect.
But what we want to talk about today is just
sort of like this, this idea of addiction in the
(02:30):
past and the present and what are some of the
driving conditions. So this idea of addictive substances, Um, you
go back far enough in history and you get into it.
I mean, you don't have to go far back in
history at all, where our culture is full of simplistic
examples of what's going on, simplistic explanations for what's going on.
(02:51):
You know, you can say, oh, well, that person is addicted.
Clearly there's a flaw on their character, or that person
is addicted, there's a there you know, they're completely controlled
by this demonic substance. Or you can throw it to
environment and say, well, they're just not in a good
environment to uh you know, and that is what's making
them weak to this substance. And that's the thing too.
(03:12):
It's often seen, even even among people who have a
better understanding it of it, it's seen as some sort
of of of a weakness of character, even though there
that we have so much science to to argue differently. Yeah,
there's this real need to blame someone or something when
it comes to addiction. And so you had mentioned the substance, right, Oh,
it's the substance that is the problem that has deminutic,
(03:34):
demonic possession of the person. Well, if that were the case,
then everybody who ever put a bottle of whiskey to
their lips would be addicted to whiskey. Right, So we
just know that that logic is faulty, and um, yes,
it's also looked at as a shortcoming in a person's
moral compass, you know, a lack of willpower. But finally
we are beginning to understand addiction in terms of a disease,
(03:56):
with genetics and environment really playing into how the human
brain can change a person's behavior. Indeed, it's that disease
model of addiction that has really taken hold and become
our major means of understanding exactly what's going on, even
even though again that still hasn't quite seeped into every
uh you know, level of our culture in terms of
(04:17):
viewing addiction in those round us. Yeah, but I do
think that the more and more information that is um
that's really given to the disease brain part, the more
we can understand it as a disease like diabetes or
anything else that's sort of chronic. Um. But let's talk
really about what an addiction is, because when I think
about it, I think about this irresistible urge to consume
(04:38):
a substance or engage in a behavior over and over again,
even though I know it's going to cause me some
sort of problem later on. And it turns out there
are three dimensions to addiction. Craving kind of binging to
just in toxic intoxicating yourself, and three the withdrawal or
(04:59):
the negative effect. So you have to think about addiction
in that way. It's not just I really like uh
cremblay and so I eat that ten times a year.
It's that you can't stop eating kremblay even though you
keep throwing it up. Yeah. Yeah, there's some people, may
you know, jokingly say oh I'm addicted to this, that
or the other. But unless it's unless're actually throwing up
(05:20):
that crember lay again, you're you're you're probably not hitting
all the other points in the addiction. So some of
the basics here that you you just alluded to. Um,
we've discussed many times just in terms of what it
is to be human. And that's that's one of the
interesting things about addiction is that is really tied in
with the human experience. Um. Because you mentioned the short
(05:40):
term goal versus short term vision versus long term problems.
You know that that that constant and ability in humans
to really decide on the on the long term benefit
over the short come benefit benefit. And then the other
thing is that this is of course all um tied
in to the pleasure centers of of the in the
reward circuit about you know, in which we have neurotransmitters
(06:04):
of dopamine, and it's tied into the basic genetic mission
of the human creature. Right. Uh, we're getting getting this pleasure,
and the pleasure is a reward for things like eating, drinking, mating,
the very basic things that we have to check check
off the list in terms to meet that genetic mission.
But when you layer up on you know, all the
complexity of cognitive evolution human culture, it gets more complicated.
(06:28):
So suddenly have all these other different activities that can
end up releasing dopamine. I mean everything from eating and
drinking and mating to going shopping. Studies of showing you
get that release sometimes even when you're you're you know,
donating to charity, uh, but also when you're engaging in
something like illicit drug use, or even even quote unquote
non illicit drug use, legal drug use, or or even
(06:51):
just a you know, a cup of coffee in the morning. Yeah.
I mean to put it really simply, pleasure is tied
into our survival. It's the way that our our bodies,
in our minds are wired. And so when you think
about these different things that we become addicted to, you
can kind of think about them in terms of supernormal stimuli.
And we talked about this how that has such a
(07:12):
pull on us, because that's that thing just kind of
like with lights blinking around it, saying, hey, this is awesome.
You should try me. If you get pleasure from me,
you should do it again. And in this way, you
could think of a drug as being a sort of
like heroine, being super normal stimuli, that sense of contentment
and pleasure that you would get. Um, your body doesn't
(07:32):
know whether or not that's a good thing or a
bad thing. It just knows the feeling. So most drugs
activate this pleasure circuitry. This uh, this dopamine circuitry that
we're talking about here. So we're talking alcohol, we're talking nicotine, heroin, cocaine,
uh amphetamines, cannabis. The only things that really don't make
this list are halluciniens, LSD and mescaline. And as a
(07:55):
side note, food can be an addiction to. But well,
we can talk about that pretty like any human behavior.
So let's say that you have, you know, a glass
of wine. There's that reward that occurs in the brain.
You get a flood of dopamine or I shouldn't say
a flood because it's not an actual flood, but you
get a significant amount or increase in the brain that
(08:15):
feels like a flood, and that strengthens the neural pathways
the memory of the behavior, making it far easier to
recall the pleasure and then engage in that behavior again
and again. Yeah, this is interesting. One of the presenters
at the World Science Festival mentioned nine eleven. The whole idea,
you know, everyone knows or thinks thinks that thinks they
(08:36):
know exactly what they were doing when nine eleven occurred,
like that strong memory, that that sort of pillar standing
up standing out from the landscape of our existing memories.
And drug memories are like that, nor a de alcohol.
What's the presenter by the way. Um, But on one hand,
this this this sounds completely obvious, right, because when when
(08:57):
one is engaging in some some kind of drug, be
it a cup of coffee, a cigarette, wine, heroine, etcetera,
we're dealing with a heightened level level of pleasure and therefore,
conceivably that is a more memorable moment. Right. You're feeling
really good at that moment, and therefore your brain is
encoding that memory and all the very stimuli around it.
So it's not just I had a cigarette and a
(09:18):
cigarette was uh enjoyable and was pleasurable. But I had
a cigarette at a bar. I had a cigarette among
this group of people, this song was playing. All this
stuff sort of gets encoded into the memory. Yeah, And
that's the thing that makes us really complicated in the
sense because it's very hard to chease out the behavior
from the genetics, from the memory, from the environment. It's
(09:40):
almost like all of these have a bit of play
into addiction. And according to the National Institute of Health,
you can see that with brain imaging technology that addiction
is disrupting specific brain circuits affected by addiction. And they
say that this these changes go beyond the brain's rewards
stem to include regions involved in memory learning, impulse control,
(10:03):
and we'll talk more about that later. Stress reactivity and
repeated drugg exposure resets these circuits toward compulsive behavior, so
that a person's control over the desire to seek and
use drugs is compromised, despite whatever consequences arise. So I
thought that was interesting. Again, it's not just the behavior,
(10:23):
it's that it's creating these kind of neural pathways, these
sort of ghosts in the machine of your brain. So
even if you abstain from from drugs or that thing,
you may still have triggers that would activate those pathways.
(10:47):
All right, we're back. We're discussing addiction, the science of addiction.
We've just finished talking about addiction. UM, what it is,
how it works, What are some of the basics, uh
in terms of our understanding of of of addiction from
a disease model standpoint. And UH, this leads to the
inevitable question who becomes addicted? Because we we've seen this,
(11:10):
We see this all the time in the world around this.
It's not an equal playing field. Addiction is not an
equally equal opportunity offender. Uh, some people have more of
a problem with it than others. And how do we
figure that out? Like what's going on there? We can't
just say it's you know, God shooting lightning bolts of
addiction down at people and making uh, you know, packets
(11:30):
of drugs land in front of some and not others.
I mean they're uh, just as addiction itself is a
is more complex than that. Uh, who becomes an addict
is also a fairly complex situation. Yeah, And of course
the older model would be, oh, it's the person who
has no will power, It's the person who just doesn't
have any integrity. And we know this is not true.
We know that addiction is not any one sort of
(11:53):
magic bullet um that arrives in a person's chest. You
could have a genetic disposition which would cause you to
have a blunted reaction to dopamine, and that would require
more and more of the substance to produce the same
sense of pleasure in someone else. So in other words,
for me, um, I genetically have stuff um that has
to do with addiction in my family. So it maybe
(12:15):
maybe that I need uh six beers to your two
beers to have that same level of dopamine activity in
the brain in that sense of pleasure. So that's one
way that that a person might be become addicted because
they have circumstances in place. And then of course we
have um, you know the environment, um, how much stress
(12:38):
is in that environment, and we also have the way
that the brain develops. So genetics, let's talk about this
real quick. Studies of identical twins indicate that as much
as half of an individual's risk of becoming addicted to nicotine, alcohol,
or other drugs depends on his or her genes and
twin studies on addiction don't reveal the full reaction range
(12:58):
of genotype, right, but they do indicate that under a
particular and really relevant societal scenarios, genetype plays a substantial
role in your vulnerability. Is pretty impressive because that is
that is higher than some cancers in terms of how
much genetics is playing a role. Now, it's also not
as simple as saying, oh, well, here's the gene for addiction,
(13:22):
can we zapp that. No, it's it's more complicated than that.
We are we're not at the point yet where we
can just say we can look at somebody and do
some sort of funny little scan or blood test and say, oh, well,
this person is prone to addiction, although one day we
may be able to but of course that it's just
it's a hard thing to answer right now because UM,
you know, if you if you were to scan a
child and say you would appear that you may become
(13:45):
addicted to something or you may have addictive behavior, part
of that environment is going to factor into that. UM.
So again it's just not that UM, you know, cut
and dried. So David Lyndon the neuroscience, as an author
of the Compass of Pleasure UM, has some really good
information outfare about variants and genes that turned down the
(14:06):
function of dopamine signaling in the brain. If anybody wants
to read more about that. UM, but we should probably
talk about environment and its stressors triggering self medicating behavior
because David Lyndon says that stress hormones are secreted by
your adrenal glands and that sits on top of your kidneys,
and they pass into your brain and they bind stress
(14:26):
hormone receptors on neurons in your pleasure circuit, and they
set in motion a series of biochemical steps that end
with you, say, having a bowl of ice cream or
smoking a cigarette, essentially anything that's pleasurable to try to
negate the stress chemical reaction happening in your body. Right,
and then we eventually end up encoding the habit right
(14:47):
where we associate feeling stressful with the release of having
that cigarette, that ice cream more of course, been in
Jerry's cigarette ice cream. Yeah, and we can. We'll talk
a little bit more about habits later on. But then
you also have other conditions like you might have PTSD,
you might have depression or a d h D, and
those underlying factors could certainly ramp up this feeling of stress,
(15:09):
anxiety or depression. Um add to this, you have teenagers
who are beginning to take on some of these substances,
and their brains are pretty malleable. We know this. We
know that the preventable cortex, for instance, the seat of judgment,
doesn't even really complete itself until the age of in
some cases much older. So we know already that teenagers
(15:36):
are at risk in the sense that they don't have
the sort of executive functions that might stop them from
engaging in risky, risky behavior. But moreover, there's some evidence that, say,
dabbling with nicotine with cigarettes could actually prepare their brains
to become more receptive to other substances. Yeah, this is
(15:57):
really interesting research because it deals impart with that idea
of of something as a gateway substance, as a gateway drug,
which is a term that has really lost a lot
of value, I feel, thanks to its overuse in drug
war campaigning, because because you know, we we all heard
this growing up. You know, this substance, this experience is
(16:19):
a gateway to other experiences. It's like you know, stepping
your your foot into the water and then that undertow
is gonna grab you and just drag you down through
worse and or drug experiences into some sort of ultimate doom.
And of course people's realities tend to be uh you know,
they say, oh, well, you know, don't smoke cigarettes. It's
a it's a it's a gateway drug. And then what
(16:39):
when one eventually tries a cigarette and they realize, hey,
my life didn't just end. You know, I don't feel
the world collapsing around me. I don't feel that undertow
dragging me down. Therefore this can't be that bad, and
those they must have been just completely full of it
and trying to scare me with scare tactics into not
trying these things. So it's you know, reasons like that
that you end up throwing the idea of a gateway
(17:02):
drug out out the window. But the science behind this,
UH really argues in the favor of of cigarettes, particularly
serving as I almost don't want to stay gateway drive
because again that the term is so uh so bad.
But but but what is occurring here is that the
nicotine is essentially opening up the pathways, loosening the pathway
(17:25):
for addictive behavior with other substances. Yeah, according to UH
neurobiologists a Mere Levine, and he was on the panel
of cocaine users smoked first in their teenage years, which
is astounding. So he thought, well, is this is just
you know, cause correlation here is there's something actually to this,
And so he and his colleagues began to look to
(17:48):
see if there are any long lasting changes in nicotine
use um in the formative years in the teenage years,
so whether they do. They applied mice with nicotine, followed
seven days later by cook cane and compared with mace
on cocaine who had not previously received nicotine, the animals
were percent more active and seventy eight percent more likely
(18:10):
to return to areas previously associated with the cocaine. Yeah,
and the reverse did not hold true, that cocaine had
no effect on nicotine induced behavior in the mice stepped
in the study. Right. So, um, this all has to
do with something called the fosph B gene, which is
related to addiction. And what we see is sort of
(18:31):
a this is sort of Layman's terms. Are I'm gonna
get too deep into it. Um, Probably the best way
to say this is that there's a sort of a
greater expression of that gene, of that fosp by gene.
If as you say that, the pathways have been loosened
by nicotine. So when cocaine comes along, Hey, look at this,
we we sort of know the drill. Here's what we're
(18:52):
talking about. Yeah. Yeah, it loosens up the DNA packaging system.
That's that's involved here, and it's in it and it
allows greater express action of that fospe gene. Now, the
added problem here is um, as we've talked about before,
the amygdala in teenagers has a heightened sense of fear
and a heightened sense of stress when you're a teenager.
(19:14):
And the magdala is so interesting to me because it
processes both physical pain and emotional pain. So if you're
a teenager and you're brooding, you really may feel like
life is terrible, life is ending, you're being hurt. Yeah,
we did that whole episode on the what I was
a teenage teenager? I think, yeah, I was a teenage teenager,
and so it was I think we had mentioned then,
(19:35):
So as an adult, do you hear a teenager talking
about this and you feel like they're just being histrionic
when in fact they are actually feeling that level of
pain and discomfort. Yeah, and there I think we discussed
in that that episode. And one of the things about
the teenager's brain is that from a you know, an
evolutionary standpoint, the teenager is primed to leave his or
(19:55):
her community and find a new community in which to thrive,
which means that there's an increased dependence on social pressures,
on fitting in with a social group, because that, in
an evolutionary sense, means survival and you know, to add
more fuel to the fire if you happen to be
that person who's whose genes dictate an amygdala in the
first place, that's more reactive to stress. Then you are
(20:18):
going to feel things a little bit stronger than your
average bear, both as a teenager, teenager and an adult.
So that makes dealing with environmental factors UH emotions a
lot harder. And you can see how people begin to
turn to things to comfort themselves, right, whether it be
food or smoking, or drugs or some other leave sex addiction, UM,
(20:40):
there are so many different ways to to actually try
to stoke those UM. I guess you can call them
members of pleasure and content. Now, an important thing to
keep in mind about about addiction is that it actually
changes the brain UH in many ways, physically changes the
brain of the addict UH and uh and and so
(21:01):
we're gonna run through some of the changes that are
happening here. Yeah, we mentioned that there is a loss
of dopamine receptors in the brains of addicts as D
two receptors, So again you would see that it takes
more dopamine to get that same sort of level in
your brain of pleasure. And we I think we mentioned
(21:22):
that more in genetics. But when you're taking a substance
UM repeatedly, of course you're going to have some changes
in your dopamine receptors. And what's interesting here too, is
that it's not not just the dopamine receptors as affected
by the drug, because that's kind of an obvious, almost
a cliche that we understand with with drug addiction. Oh well,
(21:43):
now you have to use more to try and chase
that original high, or you're having to drink more to
to to to to reach the same level that you're
reaching previously. But it also bleeds over to other areas
of the dopamine experience, and two things such as love
I appreciate and a food various you know, and other
other things in life that would give you the same
(22:04):
dopamine effect, you feel less of it. So an addict
ends up feeling their connection to the rest of the
world dampened or even deadened. Uh and UH. And the
easiest way to feel normal again in regards to those
connections is to turn back to that drug that's warped
the dopamine uh cycle to begin with. Yeah, it's terrible,
right because at first you you're just chasing pleasure, and
(22:25):
then UH that the effects of that substance have taken
such a toll that you're just trying to chase a
sort of equilibrium. Yeah, that's an important thing to keep
in mind. And and also, um, something that they hit
on in the presentation of World Science Festival is that
there's it's easy to fall into this outsider mode of
thinking that, oh, a addic just likes to feel good
(22:47):
and that's why they keep taking the substance in order
to feel good and to get high and to escape.
Whereas that, to your point, it eventually becomes not about
feeling good and about recreation. It's about treating self medicating
their own illness. Really well, anybody who has experienced the
hair of the dog the next day, right, you know,
let's well, think you have a hangover hair in your mouth. Yeah,
(23:09):
you have a hangover and you've got a bunch of
dog hair clown knows on and uh, you don't know
what happened. No, actually you wake up and you say,
I'll just have a beer to sort of reset myself.
I've always wondered if that works. I always read about it,
and you know, they're always doing that in various noir
stories and all but work. I feel like we went
(23:29):
in we went over this in the Hangover episode we
did ages ago, but I don't recall. I don't know,
it's been so long since I engaged in that I
feel like I probably did it. And then, you know,
probably later that night, had more of whatever like wine,
and then felt terrible again, and then woke up again
and again. You see how this all plays out. What
I thought was interesting about the panel at the World
Science Festival is that they showed the brains of a
(23:51):
methodic heroin addict and um an obese person, and what
they saw, again is all less D two receptors in
the brain. And they said, look this this is also
true for obesity, which is essentially food addiction. And if
you look in terms of obesity cases of severe obesity
our food addiction, with only ten of the cases of
(24:14):
severe severe obesity having to do with a metabolic defect. Again,
some of this bleeds over to this other area. When
we talk about obesity, we tend to judge the person
in the willpower right or the lack of willpower, when
what we're seeing here is the habit becoming so ingrained.
Another way the brain changes, addiction results in more synaps connections.
(24:37):
This is the idea that the pathways to the habit
forms more connections. Uh, and then more the more the
substances abused. And this is an area that research are
still trying to to fully understand what's going on here.
But but my understanding, based on the research materials we're
looking at, is that that this is thought to tie
in tow again those drug memories. There are formed the
(24:59):
idea that when one is taking the substance, you're encoding
all these memories about the use of the substance, the
environment which the substance is used, and and then that's
playing into these various synaps connections. Yeah. They had a
great image of that and you could see where the
little synaptic connections were created and um, and it did
(25:20):
kind of give you this idea like, here's all this
stuff that's being created so that you can have a sticky,
sticky memory of the path to get back to the
behavior or the addiction. Yeah, sticky memory in a sense.
It's like a sticky placed right on the brains thing. Yea, hey,
this is this is the way to feel good right here. Well,
it's kind of and it was sort of a terrifying
image too, because I sort of showed that the normal
(25:41):
snapped the connection there and then this other sort of
thing that shows up and it had sound effects to
remember it kind of went right, did have some sort
of alien like brain alien Yeah. Um. The other thing
that has affected is your hippocampus that's sort of rewired
in the brains of alcoholics. And we talk about hipocampus,
we're talking more about memory here. So it would make
(26:03):
sense that if you're an alcoholic, um, a lot of
your memories are going to be stored in the same
way or even committed long term in the same way.
And what has been found is that heavy drinking can
reduce total hippocampus volume, and that was reported in the
November two thousand and six issue of Alcoholism Clinical and
Experimental Research. I've seen other papers on this too that
(26:28):
will say, now the person's memory while it can suffer
that the brain sort of shuttles um the hippocampus or
rather some of the functions of the hippocampus to other
parts of the branding to try to make up for that. Um.
But what we're talking about here is an imperfect memory, right. Also,
it has an effect on willpower, you know, with the
(26:49):
with decreased willpower. Yeah, so that's kind of you know,
adding links insult to injury here, right, because you know,
you engage in the behavior and if it becomes rutinized
enough than all of a sudden, that part of your
brain that deals with executive function, well, you don't have
nearly as much neural activity there because of the behavior.
(27:11):
So even if you wanted to quit, it makes it
that much harder. Another way that that that we're actually
seeing the brain change here with addiction. UH two thousand twelve,
research from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine,
using mice in a in a research project, found that
heavy alcohol use actually a rewires brain circuity, making it
(27:32):
get harder for alcoholics to recover psychologically following a traumatic experience,
which again feels like another kick in the gut to
this overall situation because suddenly decreased the willpower and you're
gonna have harder time bouncing back from from traumatic events.
And therefore, what comfort blanket you run to, You go
to the the substance that is the gateway to feeling
(27:53):
normal again. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit more specifically
about relapse on the next episode. UM but when we
talk out more abou the future of addiction. UM but, yeah,
I mean that when do people tend to relapse, Not
when things are going well, it's when something terrible, stressful
is happening in their lives. And um again, you've got
those ghosts of the neural furcuatory just sitting there waiting
(28:15):
to be activated. Yeah. I think when we were discussing
habits in one of our habit episodes for around the
year's time, I think we talked about when that when
the brain forms a new habit, it's like it's like
a road. Okay, you have a two lane highway going
from point A to point B. When you want to
build a new road, you have to build next to
that existing road, you know, or even off of that
(28:36):
existing road. So maybe you have the new four lane
highway over here, but that two lane highway is still there.
The brain still knows where it is, and if it
has to, or if it thinks it has to, it
will take that road. That's right. So if that road
is that you take a drink at six pm, and
that's when all of this would begin these triggers, then
you just take the other road. Maybe you go and
work out at six pm. You have to take something
(28:59):
else to place the behavior in order to really sort
of um mess with the ghosts of the neural circuitry um.
In fact, when we talk about habit um, there are
a couple of authors and researchers and m Grabel and
Kyle S. Smith writing for Scientific American, and they say
that we learn in chunks, kind of like if you're
committing the digits of pie to your your memory, you
(29:22):
would probably do them in chunks, like say seven digits, right,
And they're saying the same thing happens with habits. And
this happens when the prefrontal cortex communicates with a stri
itum and the stri item communicates with the mid brain
where dopamine helps with learning and assigning values to values
to goals. And they say that these circuits create feedback
(29:44):
loops which help us to figure out what's working and
not working in behavior. And as we were even and
that's that's sort of the point where you can be like,
I don't know about this behavior, right, Like you're maybe
you're executive functions are sort of still intact. But let's
say you keep repeating the behavior over and over again, Well,
that feedback loops become stronger, stamping routines into these single
(30:08):
units or chunks. Yeah, the chunking process, which I think
when we've touched on on this before, the analogy I
always go to is is like hot keys. You know,
instead of instead of going through you know, go to
the drag down menu and in a program and then
go to another sub menu to pull up this cool
that use all the time, you just start using the
hot key, and then the hot key becomes such a
(30:30):
habit you forget how to find it elsewhere. You may
even forget what the hot key is. You just have
the muscle memory of hitting it. And this you see
the same thing in various programming right, and where the
program is in X than y and z. So that's
what your brain is doing. It's taking the shortcuts. It's
a it's an economic way of doing the same task
over and over again. Well, here's the crazy thing that
these researchers saw is that and they saw this in
(30:52):
rats too. By the way they saw they did a
ton of research on this um They saw that chunking,
that imprinting getting stronger and stronger with the feedback loops
and a aventually another system called the infro limbic system. Well,
it says, I'll help you out here, strike item, and
I'll help you chunk some more of these and imprint
this stuff. And so what happens is that the infrolymbics
(31:13):
cortex begins to work in concert with dopamine and begins
to really control when we should dabble in this activity.
And it's almost like that infrolymbics system becomes it's sort
of like this outside part of the brain going, well, okay,
strike item. If you're gonna keep doing this and your
(31:34):
loops are gonna get you know, uh more and more
well trenched, then I'll go ahead and let this behavior.
And as we talked about with Charles Doohig and his
book about habits, at some point habits become so ingrained
that your prefrontal cortex is just like, you know what,
I don't need to do this. I know this, this
person's this is that person's habit, and I don't I
(31:55):
just need to give radio silent here because the rest
of the brain knows what to do now and pick
up all right. So I know what everyone's wondering at
this point is all this damage we've we've we've talked
about the changes that occurring to the brain of the
damage is it reversible? Can you actually turn back the
clock on this and and sort of reclaim the brain
kind of depends on ageing genetics according to the panel
(32:18):
from the World Science Festival, and the level of neural plasticities. So, hey,
if you're younger and you catch this, well, obviously the
damage to your brain can be UM, then you can
kind of go back in the time machine and work
things back out. And you're often earlier in the overall
timeline of addiction to so you have that working in
(32:39):
your advantage. So basically, the earlier you catch it, the
earlier you're able to actually get in there and not
not not as much as even turn back the clock
as much as just try to prevent um going further
down the road the better if you're going to be
If you are further down the road, Um, you've got
those molecular and cellular scars that remain on the brain. Um,
(33:01):
you could actually maybe have a little injection of synthetic
human growth hormone. And researchers from Upselling University and so
we didn't have been doing this. They have been looking
at brain cells targeted for early death by continued opiate use,
and they're seeing that that some of those cells can
be salvaged by this um human growth HORMONELL so, but
(33:25):
you know who knows sort of what the side effects
are that and that's yeah, certainly down the road. Don't
head your bets on that and say, oh, I'll just
get an injection at my brain and that will fix
everything once I've I've actually put put the halt on
the drug use. Yeah, if you've listened to our earlier episodes. Uh,
don't be on yourself if you've been stung by jellyfish,
don't self trepionate, and don't inject yourself with h H.
(33:49):
All right, So there you have it. Uh, there is ah,
just you know, intro into the science of addiction. What's
happening in the brain, what kind of changes are occurring
and uh, and what can be done ultimately to reverse
some of this damage and put a stamp on it. Yeah.
And David Lyndon said something very interesting to Terry Gross
when he was on her show and he was talking
(34:09):
about his book The Compass of Pleasure. He said, when
you understand the biology of the pleasure circuit and when
you understand how the contribution of genetics and stress and
life experience. Actually, even starting in the womb and going
forward all come together. The end result is that you
have to realize that any one of us, any one
of us, could be an addict at any time. Addiction
(34:33):
is not fundamentally a moral failing. It's not a disease
of weak willed losers. When you look at the biology.
The only model of addiction that makes sense as a
disease based model, and the only attitude towards addicts that
makes sense is one of compassion. So they have it
(34:54):
the science of addiction. And hey, the next episode is
going to explore the future of addiction, so I hope
you will stay tuned UH to listen to that episode
as well. In the meantime, you can explore this and
countless other topics that stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's our mothership. That's where you'll find all the videos
on the podcast, blog posts, the links out to our
social media accounts like our Facebook, our Twitter, and our tumbler.
(35:16):
And hey, if you want to shoot us an email,
if you have thoughts about addiction, UH, your own dealings
with it, your own dealings with the science of it,
you can send us an email at Blow the Mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
(35:37):
dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome the Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. And hey, it's summer. People
are on break. Uh, So we thought we'd rerun a
couple of episodes that we're really proud of that I
think has a lot of really insightful information about addiction.
(00:26):
So without further ado, let's dive into the science of addiction.
Julie has returned to us from New York City once more.
It's true, you have returned from Laryngitisville. Yes, yes, for
the most part. Yeah, yeah, you're there. Um. Yes. When
(00:47):
I was in New York, I attended the World Science Festival,
which if you guys have never heard about it, you
should immediately well after this episode check it out because
they have some online offerings that are wonderful. Like when
I was there, I checked out this panel on something
called the craving brain. And that's what we're going to
talk about today, this idea of what addiction is and
(01:07):
what it is not. So it's it's about the craving brain,
not craving brains. Not that. Yeah. No zombie content, as
far as I know, is going to tumble forth from
our lips today because it's my understanding, if you showed
up for this, uh, this talk expecting a light hireded
discussion about zombies, you would have been pretty disappointed. And
so that's what we're discussing in this episode. Addiction, the
(01:28):
science of addiction and uh and it's it's really fascinating
this topic because for me, I had not really looked
into it. Before I had, I wouldn't say this just
a surface level understanding of addiction, Like I was pretty
to some of the science and some of the the
levels of deeper understanding involved in addiction research. But but
(01:49):
still it's so misunderstood at large in our culture even today. Yeah,
and I feel like we are only now getting a
baseline understanding of it. And a lot of that has
to do with the in itself. We talked about this
all the time, like we still don't know exactly how
the brain works, and we have more of a clue
now than we did a hundred years ago or even
twenty years ago. Um, But the fact of the matter
(02:10):
that addiction at large is still going to be something
that we can't fully cover in depth, and in fact,
for us to do that, we would just have to
become the addiction podcast, so we could really um give
it its due day to talk about every single aspect.
But what we want to talk about today is just
sort of like this, this idea of addiction in the
(02:30):
past and the present and what are some of the
driving conditions. So this idea of addictive substances, Um, you
go back far enough in history and you get into it.
I mean, you don't have to go far back in
history at all, where our culture is full of simplistic
examples of what's going on, simplistic explanations for what's going on.
(02:51):
You know, you can say, oh, well, that person is addicted.
Clearly there's a flaw on their character, or that person
is addicted, there's a there you know, they're completely controlled
by this demonic substance. Or you can throw it to
environment and say, well, they're just not in a good
environment to uh you know, and that is what's making
them weak to this substance. And that's the thing too.
(03:12):
It's often seen, even even among people who have a
better understanding it of it, it's seen as some sort
of of of a weakness of character, even though there
that we have so much science to to argue differently. Yeah,
there's this real need to blame someone or something when
it comes to addiction. And so you had mentioned the substance, right, Oh,
it's the substance that is the problem that has deminutic,
(03:34):
demonic possession of the person. Well, if that were the case,
then everybody who ever put a bottle of whiskey to
their lips would be addicted to whiskey. Right, So we
just know that that logic is faulty, and um, yes,
it's also looked at as a shortcoming in a person's
moral compass, you know, a lack of willpower. But finally
we are beginning to understand addiction in terms of a disease,
(03:56):
with genetics and environment really playing into how the human
brain can change a person's behavior. Indeed, it's that disease
model of addiction that has really taken hold and become
our major means of understanding exactly what's going on, even
even though again that still hasn't quite seeped into every
uh you know, level of our culture in terms of
(04:17):
viewing addiction in those round us. Yeah, but I do
think that the more and more information that is um
that's really given to the disease brain part, the more
we can understand it as a disease like diabetes or
anything else that's sort of chronic. Um. But let's talk
really about what an addiction is, because when I think
about it, I think about this irresistible urge to consume
(04:38):
a substance or engage in a behavior over and over again,
even though I know it's going to cause me some
sort of problem later on. And it turns out there
are three dimensions to addiction. Craving kind of binging to
just in toxic intoxicating yourself, and three the withdrawal or
(04:59):
the negative effect. So you have to think about addiction
in that way. It's not just I really like uh
cremblay and so I eat that ten times a year.
It's that you can't stop eating kremblay even though you
keep throwing it up. Yeah. Yeah, there's some people, may
you know, jokingly say oh I'm addicted to this, that
or the other. But unless it's unless're actually throwing up
(05:20):
that crember lay again, you're you're you're probably not hitting
all the other points in the addiction. So some of
the basics here that you you just alluded to. Um,
we've discussed many times just in terms of what it
is to be human. And that's that's one of the
interesting things about addiction is that is really tied in
with the human experience. Um. Because you mentioned the short
(05:40):
term goal versus short term vision versus long term problems.
You know that that that constant and ability in humans
to really decide on the on the long term benefit
over the short come benefit benefit. And then the other
thing is that this is of course all um tied
in to the pleasure centers of of the in the
reward circuit about you know, in which we have neurotransmitters
(06:04):
of dopamine, and it's tied into the basic genetic mission
of the human creature. Right. Uh, we're getting getting this pleasure,
and the pleasure is a reward for things like eating, drinking, mating,
the very basic things that we have to check check
off the list in terms to meet that genetic mission.
But when you layer up on you know, all the
complexity of cognitive evolution human culture, it gets more complicated.
(06:28):
So suddenly have all these other different activities that can
end up releasing dopamine. I mean everything from eating and
drinking and mating to going shopping. Studies of showing you
get that release sometimes even when you're you're you know,
donating to charity, uh, but also when you're engaging in
something like illicit drug use, or even even quote unquote
non illicit drug use, legal drug use, or or even
(06:51):
just a you know, a cup of coffee in the morning. Yeah.
I mean to put it really simply, pleasure is tied
into our survival. It's the way that our our bodies,
in our minds are wired. And so when you think
about these different things that we become addicted to, you
can kind of think about them in terms of supernormal stimuli.
And we talked about this how that has such a
(07:12):
pull on us, because that's that thing just kind of
like with lights blinking around it, saying, hey, this is awesome.
You should try me. If you get pleasure from me,
you should do it again. And in this way, you
could think of a drug as being a sort of
like heroine, being super normal stimuli, that sense of contentment
and pleasure that you would get. Um, your body doesn't
(07:32):
know whether or not that's a good thing or a
bad thing. It just knows the feeling. So most drugs
activate this pleasure circuitry. This uh, this dopamine circuitry that
we're talking about here. So we're talking alcohol, we're talking nicotine, heroin, cocaine,
uh amphetamines, cannabis. The only things that really don't make
this list are halluciniens, LSD and mescaline. And as a
(07:55):
side note, food can be an addiction to. But well,
we can talk about that pretty like any human behavior.
So let's say that you have, you know, a glass
of wine. There's that reward that occurs in the brain.
You get a flood of dopamine or I shouldn't say
a flood because it's not an actual flood, but you
get a significant amount or increase in the brain that
(08:15):
feels like a flood, and that strengthens the neural pathways
the memory of the behavior, making it far easier to
recall the pleasure and then engage in that behavior again
and again. Yeah, this is interesting. One of the presenters
at the World Science Festival mentioned nine eleven. The whole idea,
you know, everyone knows or thinks thinks that thinks they
(08:36):
know exactly what they were doing when nine eleven occurred,
like that strong memory, that that sort of pillar standing
up standing out from the landscape of our existing memories.
And drug memories are like that, nor a de alcohol.
What's the presenter by the way. Um, But on one hand,
this this this sounds completely obvious, right, because when when
(08:57):
one is engaging in some some kind of drug, be
it a cup of coffee, a cigarette, wine, heroine, etcetera,
we're dealing with a heightened level level of pleasure and therefore,
conceivably that is a more memorable moment. Right. You're feeling
really good at that moment, and therefore your brain is
encoding that memory and all the very stimuli around it.
So it's not just I had a cigarette and a
(09:18):
cigarette was uh enjoyable and was pleasurable. But I had
a cigarette at a bar. I had a cigarette among
this group of people, this song was playing. All this
stuff sort of gets encoded into the memory. Yeah, And
that's the thing that makes us really complicated in the
sense because it's very hard to chease out the behavior
from the genetics, from the memory, from the environment. It's
(09:40):
almost like all of these have a bit of play
into addiction. And according to the National Institute of Health,
you can see that with brain imaging technology that addiction
is disrupting specific brain circuits affected by addiction. And they
say that this these changes go beyond the brain's rewards
stem to include regions involved in memory learning, impulse control,
(10:03):
and we'll talk more about that later. Stress reactivity and
repeated drugg exposure resets these circuits toward compulsive behavior, so
that a person's control over the desire to seek and
use drugs is compromised, despite whatever consequences arise. So I
thought that was interesting. Again, it's not just the behavior,
(10:23):
it's that it's creating these kind of neural pathways, these
sort of ghosts in the machine of your brain. So
even if you abstain from from drugs or that thing,
you may still have triggers that would activate those pathways.
(10:47):
All right, we're back. We're discussing addiction, the science of addiction.
We've just finished talking about addiction. UM, what it is,
how it works, What are some of the basics, uh
in terms of our understanding of of of addiction from
a disease model standpoint. And UH, this leads to the
inevitable question who becomes addicted? Because we we've seen this,
(11:10):
We see this all the time in the world around this.
It's not an equal playing field. Addiction is not an
equally equal opportunity offender. Uh, some people have more of
a problem with it than others. And how do we
figure that out? Like what's going on there? We can't
just say it's you know, God shooting lightning bolts of
addiction down at people and making uh, you know, packets
(11:30):
of drugs land in front of some and not others.
I mean they're uh, just as addiction itself is a
is more complex than that. Uh, who becomes an addict
is also a fairly complex situation. Yeah, And of course
the older model would be, oh, it's the person who
has no will power, It's the person who just doesn't
have any integrity. And we know this is not true.
We know that addiction is not any one sort of
(11:53):
magic bullet um that arrives in a person's chest. You
could have a genetic disposition which would cause you to
have a blunted reaction to dopamine, and that would require
more and more of the substance to produce the same
sense of pleasure in someone else. So in other words,
for me, um, I genetically have stuff um that has
to do with addiction in my family. So it maybe
(12:15):
maybe that I need uh six beers to your two
beers to have that same level of dopamine activity in
the brain in that sense of pleasure. So that's one
way that that a person might be become addicted because
they have circumstances in place. And then of course we
have um, you know the environment, um, how much stress
(12:38):
is in that environment, and we also have the way
that the brain develops. So genetics, let's talk about this
real quick. Studies of identical twins indicate that as much
as half of an individual's risk of becoming addicted to nicotine, alcohol,
or other drugs depends on his or her genes and
twin studies on addiction don't reveal the full reaction range
(12:58):
of genotype, right, but they do indicate that under a
particular and really relevant societal scenarios, genetype plays a substantial
role in your vulnerability. Is pretty impressive because that is
that is higher than some cancers in terms of how
much genetics is playing a role. Now, it's also not
as simple as saying, oh, well, here's the gene for addiction,
(13:22):
can we zapp that. No, it's it's more complicated than that.
We are we're not at the point yet where we
can just say we can look at somebody and do
some sort of funny little scan or blood test and say, oh, well,
this person is prone to addiction, although one day we
may be able to but of course that it's just
it's a hard thing to answer right now because UM,
you know, if you if you were to scan a
child and say you would appear that you may become
(13:45):
addicted to something or you may have addictive behavior, part
of that environment is going to factor into that. UM.
So again it's just not that UM, you know, cut
and dried. So David Lyndon the neuroscience, as an author
of the Compass of Pleasure UM, has some really good
information outfare about variants and genes that turned down the
(14:06):
function of dopamine signaling in the brain. If anybody wants
to read more about that. UM, but we should probably
talk about environment and its stressors triggering self medicating behavior
because David Lyndon says that stress hormones are secreted by
your adrenal glands and that sits on top of your kidneys,
and they pass into your brain and they bind stress
(14:26):
hormone receptors on neurons in your pleasure circuit, and they
set in motion a series of biochemical steps that end
with you, say, having a bowl of ice cream or
smoking a cigarette, essentially anything that's pleasurable to try to
negate the stress chemical reaction happening in your body. Right,
and then we eventually end up encoding the habit right
(14:47):
where we associate feeling stressful with the release of having
that cigarette, that ice cream more of course, been in
Jerry's cigarette ice cream. Yeah, and we can. We'll talk
a little bit more about habits later on. But then
you also have other conditions like you might have PTSD,
you might have depression or a d h D, and
those underlying factors could certainly ramp up this feeling of stress,
(15:09):
anxiety or depression. Um add to this, you have teenagers
who are beginning to take on some of these substances,
and their brains are pretty malleable. We know this. We
know that the preventable cortex, for instance, the seat of judgment,
doesn't even really complete itself until the age of in
some cases much older. So we know already that teenagers
(15:36):
are at risk in the sense that they don't have
the sort of executive functions that might stop them from
engaging in risky, risky behavior. But moreover, there's some evidence that, say,
dabbling with nicotine with cigarettes could actually prepare their brains
to become more receptive to other substances. Yeah, this is
(15:57):
really interesting research because it deals impart with that idea
of of something as a gateway substance, as a gateway drug,
which is a term that has really lost a lot
of value, I feel, thanks to its overuse in drug
war campaigning, because because you know, we we all heard
this growing up. You know, this substance, this experience is
(16:19):
a gateway to other experiences. It's like you know, stepping
your your foot into the water and then that undertow
is gonna grab you and just drag you down through
worse and or drug experiences into some sort of ultimate doom.
And of course people's realities tend to be uh you know,
they say, oh, well, you know, don't smoke cigarettes. It's
a it's a it's a gateway drug. And then what
(16:39):
when one eventually tries a cigarette and they realize, hey,
my life didn't just end. You know, I don't feel
the world collapsing around me. I don't feel that undertow
dragging me down. Therefore this can't be that bad, and
those they must have been just completely full of it
and trying to scare me with scare tactics into not
trying these things. So it's you know, reasons like that
that you end up throwing the idea of a gateway
(17:02):
drug out out the window. But the science behind this,
UH really argues in the favor of of cigarettes, particularly
serving as I almost don't want to stay gateway drive
because again that the term is so uh so bad.
But but but what is occurring here is that the
nicotine is essentially opening up the pathways, loosening the pathway
(17:25):
for addictive behavior with other substances. Yeah, according to UH
neurobiologists a Mere Levine, and he was on the panel
of cocaine users smoked first in their teenage years, which
is astounding. So he thought, well, is this is just
you know, cause correlation here is there's something actually to this,
And so he and his colleagues began to look to
(17:48):
see if there are any long lasting changes in nicotine
use um in the formative years in the teenage years,
so whether they do. They applied mice with nicotine, followed
seven days later by cook cane and compared with mace
on cocaine who had not previously received nicotine, the animals
were percent more active and seventy eight percent more likely
(18:10):
to return to areas previously associated with the cocaine. Yeah,
and the reverse did not hold true, that cocaine had
no effect on nicotine induced behavior in the mice stepped
in the study. Right. So, um, this all has to
do with something called the fosph B gene, which is
related to addiction. And what we see is sort of
(18:31):
a this is sort of Layman's terms. Are I'm gonna
get too deep into it. Um, Probably the best way
to say this is that there's a sort of a
greater expression of that gene, of that fosp by gene.
If as you say that, the pathways have been loosened
by nicotine. So when cocaine comes along, Hey, look at this,
we we sort of know the drill. Here's what we're
(18:52):
talking about. Yeah. Yeah, it loosens up the DNA packaging system.
That's that's involved here, and it's in it and it
allows greater express action of that fospe gene. Now, the
added problem here is um, as we've talked about before,
the amygdala in teenagers has a heightened sense of fear
and a heightened sense of stress when you're a teenager.
(19:14):
And the magdala is so interesting to me because it
processes both physical pain and emotional pain. So if you're
a teenager and you're brooding, you really may feel like
life is terrible, life is ending, you're being hurt. Yeah,
we did that whole episode on the what I was
a teenage teenager? I think, yeah, I was a teenage teenager,
and so it was I think we had mentioned then,
(19:35):
So as an adult, do you hear a teenager talking
about this and you feel like they're just being histrionic
when in fact they are actually feeling that level of
pain and discomfort. Yeah, and there I think we discussed
in that that episode. And one of the things about
the teenager's brain is that from a you know, an
evolutionary standpoint, the teenager is primed to leave his or
(19:55):
her community and find a new community in which to thrive,
which means that there's an increased dependence on social pressures,
on fitting in with a social group, because that, in
an evolutionary sense, means survival and you know, to add
more fuel to the fire if you happen to be
that person who's whose genes dictate an amygdala in the
first place, that's more reactive to stress. Then you are
(20:18):
going to feel things a little bit stronger than your
average bear, both as a teenager, teenager and an adult.
So that makes dealing with environmental factors UH emotions a
lot harder. And you can see how people begin to
turn to things to comfort themselves, right, whether it be
food or smoking, or drugs or some other leave sex addiction, UM,
(20:40):
there are so many different ways to to actually try
to stoke those UM. I guess you can call them
members of pleasure and content. Now, an important thing to
keep in mind about about addiction is that it actually
changes the brain UH in many ways, physically changes the
brain of the addict UH and uh and and so
(21:01):
we're gonna run through some of the changes that are
happening here. Yeah, we mentioned that there is a loss
of dopamine receptors in the brains of addicts as D
two receptors, So again you would see that it takes
more dopamine to get that same sort of level in
your brain of pleasure. And we I think we mentioned
(21:22):
that more in genetics. But when you're taking a substance
UM repeatedly, of course you're going to have some changes
in your dopamine receptors. And what's interesting here too, is
that it's not not just the dopamine receptors as affected
by the drug, because that's kind of an obvious, almost
a cliche that we understand with with drug addiction. Oh well,
(21:43):
now you have to use more to try and chase
that original high, or you're having to drink more to
to to to to reach the same level that you're
reaching previously. But it also bleeds over to other areas
of the dopamine experience, and two things such as love
I appreciate and a food various you know, and other
other things in life that would give you the same
(22:04):
dopamine effect, you feel less of it. So an addict
ends up feeling their connection to the rest of the
world dampened or even deadened. Uh and UH. And the
easiest way to feel normal again in regards to those
connections is to turn back to that drug that's warped
the dopamine uh cycle to begin with. Yeah, it's terrible,
right because at first you you're just chasing pleasure, and
(22:25):
then UH that the effects of that substance have taken
such a toll that you're just trying to chase a
sort of equilibrium. Yeah, that's an important thing to keep
in mind. And and also, um, something that they hit
on in the presentation of World Science Festival is that
there's it's easy to fall into this outsider mode of
thinking that, oh, a addic just likes to feel good
(22:47):
and that's why they keep taking the substance in order
to feel good and to get high and to escape.
Whereas that, to your point, it eventually becomes not about
feeling good and about recreation. It's about treating self medicating
their own illness. Really well, anybody who has experienced the
hair of the dog the next day, right, you know,
let's well, think you have a hangover hair in your mouth. Yeah,
(23:09):
you have a hangover and you've got a bunch of
dog hair clown knows on and uh, you don't know
what happened. No, actually you wake up and you say,
I'll just have a beer to sort of reset myself.
I've always wondered if that works. I always read about it,
and you know, they're always doing that in various noir
stories and all but work. I feel like we went
(23:29):
in we went over this in the Hangover episode we
did ages ago, but I don't recall. I don't know,
it's been so long since I engaged in that I
feel like I probably did it. And then, you know,
probably later that night, had more of whatever like wine,
and then felt terrible again, and then woke up again
and again. You see how this all plays out. What
I thought was interesting about the panel at the World
Science Festival is that they showed the brains of a
(23:51):
methodic heroin addict and um an obese person, and what
they saw, again is all less D two receptors in
the brain. And they said, look this this is also
true for obesity, which is essentially food addiction. And if
you look in terms of obesity cases of severe obesity
our food addiction, with only ten of the cases of
(24:14):
severe severe obesity having to do with a metabolic defect. Again,
some of this bleeds over to this other area. When
we talk about obesity, we tend to judge the person
in the willpower right or the lack of willpower, when
what we're seeing here is the habit becoming so ingrained.
Another way the brain changes, addiction results in more synaps connections.
(24:37):
This is the idea that the pathways to the habit
forms more connections. Uh, and then more the more the
substances abused. And this is an area that research are
still trying to to fully understand what's going on here.
But but my understanding, based on the research materials we're
looking at, is that that this is thought to tie
in tow again those drug memories. There are formed the
(24:59):
idea that when one is taking the substance, you're encoding
all these memories about the use of the substance, the
environment which the substance is used, and and then that's
playing into these various synaps connections. Yeah. They had a
great image of that and you could see where the
little synaptic connections were created and um, and it did
(25:20):
kind of give you this idea like, here's all this
stuff that's being created so that you can have a sticky,
sticky memory of the path to get back to the
behavior or the addiction. Yeah, sticky memory in a sense.
It's like a sticky placed right on the brains thing. Yea, hey,
this is this is the way to feel good right here. Well,
it's kind of and it was sort of a terrifying
image too, because I sort of showed that the normal
(25:41):
snapped the connection there and then this other sort of
thing that shows up and it had sound effects to
remember it kind of went right, did have some sort
of alien like brain alien Yeah. Um. The other thing
that has affected is your hippocampus that's sort of rewired
in the brains of alcoholics. And we talk about hipocampus,
we're talking more about memory here. So it would make
(26:03):
sense that if you're an alcoholic, um, a lot of
your memories are going to be stored in the same
way or even committed long term in the same way.
And what has been found is that heavy drinking can
reduce total hippocampus volume, and that was reported in the
November two thousand and six issue of Alcoholism Clinical and
Experimental Research. I've seen other papers on this too that
(26:28):
will say, now the person's memory while it can suffer
that the brain sort of shuttles um the hippocampus or
rather some of the functions of the hippocampus to other
parts of the branding to try to make up for that. Um.
But what we're talking about here is an imperfect memory, right. Also,
it has an effect on willpower, you know, with the
(26:49):
with decreased willpower. Yeah, so that's kind of you know,
adding links insult to injury here, right, because you know,
you engage in the behavior and if it becomes rutinized
enough than all of a sudden, that part of your
brain that deals with executive function, well, you don't have
nearly as much neural activity there because of the behavior.
(27:11):
So even if you wanted to quit, it makes it
that much harder. Another way that that that we're actually
seeing the brain change here with addiction. UH two thousand twelve,
research from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine,
using mice in a in a research project, found that
heavy alcohol use actually a rewires brain circuity, making it
(27:32):
get harder for alcoholics to recover psychologically following a traumatic experience,
which again feels like another kick in the gut to
this overall situation because suddenly decreased the willpower and you're
gonna have harder time bouncing back from from traumatic events.
And therefore, what comfort blanket you run to, You go
to the the substance that is the gateway to feeling
(27:53):
normal again. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit more specifically
about relapse on the next episode. UM but when we
talk out more abou the future of addiction. UM but, yeah,
I mean that when do people tend to relapse, Not
when things are going well, it's when something terrible, stressful
is happening in their lives. And um again, you've got
those ghosts of the neural furcuatory just sitting there waiting
(28:15):
to be activated. Yeah. I think when we were discussing
habits in one of our habit episodes for around the
year's time, I think we talked about when that when
the brain forms a new habit, it's like it's like
a road. Okay, you have a two lane highway going
from point A to point B. When you want to
build a new road, you have to build next to
that existing road, you know, or even off of that
(28:36):
existing road. So maybe you have the new four lane
highway over here, but that two lane highway is still there.
The brain still knows where it is, and if it
has to, or if it thinks it has to, it
will take that road. That's right. So if that road
is that you take a drink at six pm, and
that's when all of this would begin these triggers, then
you just take the other road. Maybe you go and
work out at six pm. You have to take something
(28:59):
else to place the behavior in order to really sort
of um mess with the ghosts of the neural circuitry um.
In fact, when we talk about habit um, there are
a couple of authors and researchers and m Grabel and
Kyle S. Smith writing for Scientific American, and they say
that we learn in chunks, kind of like if you're
committing the digits of pie to your your memory, you
(29:22):
would probably do them in chunks, like say seven digits, right,
And they're saying the same thing happens with habits. And
this happens when the prefrontal cortex communicates with a stri
itum and the stri item communicates with the mid brain
where dopamine helps with learning and assigning values to values
to goals. And they say that these circuits create feedback
(29:44):
loops which help us to figure out what's working and
not working in behavior. And as we were even and
that's that's sort of the point where you can be like,
I don't know about this behavior, right, Like you're maybe
you're executive functions are sort of still intact. But let's
say you keep repeating the behavior over and over again, Well,
that feedback loops become stronger, stamping routines into these single
(30:08):
units or chunks. Yeah, the chunking process, which I think
when we've touched on on this before, the analogy I
always go to is is like hot keys. You know,
instead of instead of going through you know, go to
the drag down menu and in a program and then
go to another sub menu to pull up this cool
that use all the time, you just start using the
hot key, and then the hot key becomes such a
(30:30):
habit you forget how to find it elsewhere. You may
even forget what the hot key is. You just have
the muscle memory of hitting it. And this you see
the same thing in various programming right, and where the
program is in X than y and z. So that's
what your brain is doing. It's taking the shortcuts. It's
a it's an economic way of doing the same task
over and over again. Well, here's the crazy thing that
these researchers saw is that and they saw this in
(30:52):
rats too. By the way they saw they did a
ton of research on this um They saw that chunking,
that imprinting getting stronger and stronger with the feedback loops
and a aventually another system called the infro limbic system. Well,
it says, I'll help you out here, strike item, and
I'll help you chunk some more of these and imprint
this stuff. And so what happens is that the infrolymbics
(31:13):
cortex begins to work in concert with dopamine and begins
to really control when we should dabble in this activity.
And it's almost like that infrolymbics system becomes it's sort
of like this outside part of the brain going, well, okay,
strike item. If you're gonna keep doing this and your
(31:34):
loops are gonna get you know, uh more and more
well trenched, then I'll go ahead and let this behavior.
And as we talked about with Charles Doohig and his
book about habits, at some point habits become so ingrained
that your prefrontal cortex is just like, you know what,
I don't need to do this. I know this, this
person's this is that person's habit, and I don't I
(31:55):
just need to give radio silent here because the rest
of the brain knows what to do now and pick
up all right. So I know what everyone's wondering at
this point is all this damage we've we've we've talked
about the changes that occurring to the brain of the
damage is it reversible? Can you actually turn back the
clock on this and and sort of reclaim the brain
kind of depends on ageing genetics according to the panel
(32:18):
from the World Science Festival, and the level of neural plasticities. So, hey,
if you're younger and you catch this, well, obviously the
damage to your brain can be UM, then you can
kind of go back in the time machine and work
things back out. And you're often earlier in the overall
timeline of addiction to so you have that working in
(32:39):
your advantage. So basically, the earlier you catch it, the
earlier you're able to actually get in there and not
not not as much as even turn back the clock
as much as just try to prevent um going further
down the road the better if you're going to be
If you are further down the road, Um, you've got
those molecular and cellular scars that remain on the brain. Um,
(33:01):
you could actually maybe have a little injection of synthetic
human growth hormone. And researchers from Upselling University and so
we didn't have been doing this. They have been looking
at brain cells targeted for early death by continued opiate use,
and they're seeing that that some of those cells can
be salvaged by this um human growth HORMONELL so, but
(33:25):
you know who knows sort of what the side effects
are that and that's yeah, certainly down the road. Don't
head your bets on that and say, oh, I'll just
get an injection at my brain and that will fix
everything once I've I've actually put put the halt on
the drug use. Yeah, if you've listened to our earlier episodes. Uh,
don't be on yourself if you've been stung by jellyfish,
don't self trepionate, and don't inject yourself with h H.
(33:49):
All right, So there you have it. Uh, there is ah,
just you know, intro into the science of addiction. What's
happening in the brain, what kind of changes are occurring
and uh, and what can be done ultimately to reverse
some of this damage and put a stamp on it. Yeah.
And David Lyndon said something very interesting to Terry Gross
when he was on her show and he was talking
(34:09):
about his book The Compass of Pleasure. He said, when
you understand the biology of the pleasure circuit and when
you understand how the contribution of genetics and stress and
life experience. Actually, even starting in the womb and going
forward all come together. The end result is that you
have to realize that any one of us, any one
of us, could be an addict at any time. Addiction
(34:33):
is not fundamentally a moral failing. It's not a disease
of weak willed losers. When you look at the biology.
The only model of addiction that makes sense as a
disease based model, and the only attitude towards addicts that
makes sense is one of compassion. So they have it
(34:54):
the science of addiction. And hey, the next episode is
going to explore the future of addiction, so I hope
you will stay tuned UH to listen to that episode
as well. In the meantime, you can explore this and
countless other topics that stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's our mothership. That's where you'll find all the videos
on the podcast, blog posts, the links out to our
social media accounts like our Facebook, our Twitter, and our tumbler.
(35:16):
And hey, if you want to shoot us an email,
if you have thoughts about addiction, UH, your own dealings
with it, your own dealings with the science of it,
you can send us an email at Blow the Mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
(35:37):
dot com
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.