June 10, 2014 • 35 mins
What is addiction? Why are some people predisposed to it and what happens in the brain when addiction takes hold? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie break it all down for you and ponder the addiction-shattered brain.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey,
wasn't this stuff to blow your mind? My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie has returned to
us from New York City once a more. It's true,
and you have returned from Laryngitisville. Yes, yes for the
(00:24):
most part. Yeah, yeah, you're there. Yes. When 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. But when I
was there, I checked out this panel on something called
the craving brain. And that's what we're going to talk
(00:44):
about today, this idea of what addiction is and what
it is not. Ah, So it's about the craving brain,
not craving brains. Not that. Okay. Yeah, No zombie content,
as far as I know, is going to tumble forth
from our lips today because it's my understanding of you
showed up for this this talk expecting a light hearted
discussion about zombies. You would have been pretty disappointed. And
(01:06):
so that's what we're discussing in this episode addiction the
science of addiction, and it's really fascinating this topic because
for me, I had not really looked into it. Before
I had, I wouldn't say there's just a surface level
understanding of addiction, like I was prevy to some of
the science and some of the levels of deeper understanding
(01:27):
involved in addiction research. But 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
brain itself. We talk about this all the time. We
still don't know exactly how the brain works, and we
have more of a clue now than we did one
hundred years ago or even twenty years ago. But the
(01:49):
fact of the matter that addiction written 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 podcasts, so we could
really 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
(02:09):
in the past in the present, and what are some
of the driving conditions. Yeah, so this idea of addictive substances,
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
(02:30):
what's going on. Yeah, you know, you can say, oh,
well that person is addicted, clearly there's a flaw in
their character. Or that person is addicted, there's 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 you know, and that is
what's making them weak to this substance. And that's the
(02:51):
thing too, it's often seen, even among people who have
a better understanding it of it, it's seen as some
sort of of a weakness of character. Even know there
that we have so much science 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 it is the problem that has
(03:14):
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 logic is faulty, and 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, with
(03:36):
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 though
again that still hasn't quite seeped into every you know,
level of our culture in terms of viewing addiction in
(03:58):
those round us. Yeah, but I do think that the
more and more information that is 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. But let's talk really about what an addiction is,
because when I think about it, I think about this
irresistible urge to consume a substance or engage in a
(04:19):
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 intoxic intoxicating yourself, and
three the withdrawal or the negative effect. So you have
(04:40):
to think about addiction in that way. It's not just
I really like cremberlay and so I eat that ten
times a year. It's that you can't stop eating cremberlay
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
you're actually throwing up that crimber lay again, you're you're
(05:02):
probably not hitting all the points in the addiction. So
some of the basics here that you just alluded to,
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 it is really tied
in with the human experience. Because you mentioned the short
term goal versus short term vision versus long term problems.
(05:24):
You know that that that consonant inability in humans to
really decide on the on the long term benefit over
the short benefit benefit. And then the other thing is
that this is of course all tied in to the
pleasure centers of the brain, the reward circuit about you know,
in which we have neurotransmitters of dopamine, and it's tied
(05:46):
into the basic genetic mission of the human creature. Right,
we're getting guitting 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
into to meet that genetic mission. But when you layer
up on you know, all the complexity of cognitive evolution,
(06:06):
human culture, it gets more complicated. So suddenly we 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 have shown you get that release sometimes
even when you're you're you know, donating to charity, but
also when you're engaging in something like illicited drug use
or even even quote unquote non illicit drug use, legal
(06:29):
drug use, or even 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 bodies and 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 super normal stimuli. And we talked
(06:50):
about this how that has such a 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 heroin,
being super normal stimuli. That sense of contentment and pleasure
that you would get. Your body doesn't know whether or
(07:12):
not that's a good thing or a bad thing. It
just knows the feeling. So most drugs activate this pleasure circuitry,
this dopamine circuitry that we're talking about here. So we're
talking alcohol, we're talking nicotine, heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, cannabis. The
only things that really don't make this list are hallucinens
(07:33):
LSD and mescaline. And as a side note, food can
be an addiction to, but well, we can talk about
that pretty much any human behavior. Yeah, 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
(07:53):
amount or increase in the brain that feels like it 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 to eleven. The whole idea. You know, everyone knows
(08:15):
or thinks they know exactly what they were doing when
nine to 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 d valcohol was the presenter, by the way,
But on one hand, this sounds completely obvious, right, because
(08:36):
when one is engaging in some kind of drug, be
it a cup of coffee, a cigarette, wine, heroin, et cetera,
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.
(08:57):
So it's not just I had a cigarette and the
cigarette was 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 tease out the behavior from
the genetics, from the memory, from the environment. It's almost
(09:20):
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 effected by addiction, and they say that
these changes go beyond the brain's reward system to include
(09:40):
regions involved in memory learning, impulse control, and we'll talk
more about that later. Stress reactivity and repeated drug 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,
(10:02):
it's not just the behavior, 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
drugs or that thing, you may still have triggers that
would activate those pathways. All right, we're back. We are
(10:27):
discussing addiction, the science of addiction. We've just finished talking
about addiction, what it is, how it works, what are
some of the basics in terms of our understanding of
addiction from a disease model standpoint. And this leads to
the inevitable question who becomes addicted? Because we've seen this,
(10:48):
We see this all the time in the world around us.
It's not an equal playing field. Addiction is not an
equally equal opportunity of fender. 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 you know, packets of
(11:09):
drugs land in front of some and not others. I mean,
they're just as Addiction itself is more complex than that.
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 willpower, 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
(11:31):
sort of magic bullet 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, I genetically have stuff that has to do
(11:51):
with addiction in my family. So it may maybe that
I need six beers to your two beers to have
that same level of dope mean activity in the brain
in that sense of pleasure. So that's one way that
a person might be become addicted, because they have the
circumstances in place. And then of course we have you
(12:14):
know the environment, how much stress 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 twins. Studies
on addiction don't reveal the full reaction range of genotype, right,
(12:38):
but they do indicate that under a particular and really
relevant societal scenarios, genotype plays a substantial role in your vulnerability. Yeah,
fifty percent 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 a day,
(13:00):
can we zapt that. No, it's it's more complicated than that.
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's prone to addiction, although one day we may
be able to. But of course, it's just it's a
hard thing to answer right now, because you know, if
you were to scan a child and say you, it
(13:22):
would appear that you may become addicted to something or
you may have addictive behavior. Part of that environment is
going to factor into that. Right. So again, it's just
not that you know, cut and dried, so David Linden,
the neuroscientists and author of the Compass of Pleasure, has
some really good information out there about variants and genes
(13:43):
that turn down the function of dopamine signaling in the
brain if anybody wants to read more about that. But
we should probably talk about environments and its stressors triggering
self medicating behavior, because David Lindon says that stress hormones
are secreted by your adrenal glands that sits on top
of your kidneys, and they pass into your brain and
(14:04):
they bind stress 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
(14:25):
where we associate feeling stressful with the release of having
that cigarette, that ice cream, or of course been in
Jerry's cigarette ice cream. Yeah, and we'll talk a little
bit more about habit later on. But then you also
have other conditions like you might have PTSD, you might
have depression or ADHD, and those underlying factors could certainly
ramp up this feeling of stress, anxiety, or depression. Add
(14:50):
to this, you have teenagers who are beginning to take
on some of these substances, and their brains are pretty male.
We know this. We know that the proofnabal cortex, for instance,
the seat of judgment, doesn't even really complete itself until
the age of twenty five, in some cases much older.
(15:10):
So we know already that teenagers are at risk in
the sense that they don't have the sort of executive
functions that might stop them from engaging in risky behavior.
But moreover, there's some evidence that, say, dabbling with nicotine
with cigarettes could actually prepare their brains to become more
(15:33):
receptive to other substances. Yeah, this is really interesting research
because it deals in part with that idea 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 all heard this growing up.
(15:54):
You know, the substance, this experience is a gateway to
other experiences. It's like you know, stepping your foot into
the water, and then that undertow is going to grab
you and just drag you down through worse and worse
drug experiences into some sort of ultimate doom. And of
course people's realities tend to be you know, they say, oh, well,
you know, don't smoke cigarettes. It's a it's a it's
(16:16):
a gateway drug. And then 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 he must have been
just completely full of it and trying to scare me
with scare tactics into not trying these things. So it's
(16:36):
you know, reasons like that that you often end up
throwing the idea of a gateway drug out out the window.
But the science behind this really argues in the favor
of cigarettes, particularly serving as I almost don't want to
say gateway drug because again the term is so so bad,
but it But what is occurring here is that the
(16:59):
nicket is essentially opening up the pathways, loosening the pathway
for addictive behavior with other substances. Yeah, according to neurobiologists
Amir Levine, and he was on the panel, ninety seven
percent of cocaine users smoked first in their teenage years,
which is astounding. So he thought, well, is this is just,
(17:19):
you know, cause correlation here is there's something actually to this,
And so he and his colleagues began to look to
see if there are any long lasting changes in nicotine
use in the formative years, in the teenage years, so
whether they do. They applied mice with nicotine, followed seven
days later by cocaine, and compared with mice on cocaine
(17:41):
who had not previously received nicotine, the animals were ninety
eight percent more active and seventy eight percent more likely
to return to areas previously associated with the cocaine. Yeah,
and the reverse did not hold true. The cocaine had
no effect on nicotine induced behavior and the mind tested
in the study. Right, So this all has to do
(18:04):
with something called the foss Be gene, which is related
to addiction. And what we see is sort of a
this is sort of Blameman's terms, or I'm not going
to get too deep into it. Probably the best way
to say this is that there's a sort of a
greater expression of that gene, of that foss B gene if,
as you say that, the pathways have been loosened by nicotine.
(18:25):
So when cocaine comes along, Hey look at this, we
sort of know the drill here is what we're 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 expression of
that foss Be gene. Now, the added problem here is,
as we've talked about before, the amygdala in teenagers has
(18:47):
a heightened sense of fear and a heightened sense of
stress when you're a teenager. And amygdala 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
(19:08):
what I was a teenage teenager? I think, Yeah, I
was a teenage teenager, and so it was I think
we had mentioned then. So as an adult, you hear
a teenager talking about this and you feel like they're
just being history onic, when in fact they are actually
feeling that level of pain and discomfort. Yeah, and there
I think we discussed in that episode. One of the
things about the teenager's brain is that, from you know,
(19:30):
an evolutionary standpoint, the teenager is primed to leave his
or 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 whose genes dictate an amygdala in the
(19:53):
first place that's more reactive to stress, then you are
going to feel things a little bit stronger than your
average bear, both as a teenager and an adult. So
that makes dealing with environmental factors 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,
(20:15):
or drugs or some other you need, sex addiction, there
are so many different ways to actually try to stoke
those I guess if you 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
in many ways. Physically changes the brain of the addict,
(20:38):
and so we're going to 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 I think
(21:00):
we mentioned that more in genetics. But when you're taking
a substance 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.
(21:21):
Oh well, now you have to use more to try
and chase that original high, where you're having to drink
more 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 into things such as love,
appreciation of food, various you know, other things in life
that would give you the same dopamine effect, you feel
(21:43):
less of it. So an addict ends up feeling their
connection to the rest of the world dampened or even deadened. Uh.
And 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 cycle to begin with. Yeah,
it's terrible, right, because at first you're just chasing pleasure,
(22:03):
and then 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 also something that they hit on in
the presentation of the World Science Festival is that there's
it's easy to fall into this outsider mode of thinking
that owen attic just likes to feel good and that's
(22:25):
why they keep taking the substance in order to feel
good and to get high and to escape. Whereas 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 people think
(22:45):
you have a hangover hair in your mouth, Yeah, you
have a hangover. You've got a bunch of dog hair,
clown knows on and 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, always read about it, and you know
they're always doing that in various noir stories and all,
but yeah work. I feel like we went over this
(23:08):
in the Hangover episode we did ages ago, but I
don't recall. Oh no, 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 Times Festival is that they showed
(23:28):
the brains of a methadict, a heroin addict, and an
obese person and what they saw, again is all less
D two receptors in the brain. And they said, look,
this is also true for obesity, which is essentially food addiction.
And if you look in terms of obesity, ninety percent
of cases of severe obesity or food addiction, with only
(23:50):
ten percent of the cases of 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,
(24:12):
addiction results in more sinn apps connections. This is the
idea that the pathways to the habit forms more connections,
and then the more the substance is abused. And this
is in an area that the researcher are still trying
to fully understand what's going on here. But my understanding
based on the research materials we're looking at, is that
(24:33):
this is thought to tie in to again those drug
memories that are formed. The idea that poin one is
taking the substance, you're encoding all these memories about the
use of the substance, the environment in which the substance
is used, and that's playing into these various sinnaps connections. Yeah,
they had a great image of that and you could
see where the little synatric connections were created, and it
(24:58):
did kind of give you this idea, here's all the
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 place right on the brain saying, hey,
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 the normal snapped
(25:20):
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, it have some sort of
alien like squid. Yeah. The other thing that has affected
is your hippocampus that sort of rewired in the brains
of alcoholics. And we talk about the hippa campus. We're
talking more about memory here, So it would make sense
(25:42):
that if you're an alcoholic, a lot of your memories
aren't 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 Allcoholism Clinical and Experimental Research.
(26:04):
I've seen other papers on this too that we'll say
that the person's memory while it can suffer that the
brain sort of shuttles the hippocampus, or rather some of
the functions of the hippocampus to other parts of the
brain to try to make up for that. But what
we're talking about here is an imperfect memory, right. Also,
(26:25):
it has an effect on willpower, you know, with decreased willpower. Yeah,
so that's kind of you know, adding links some insult
to injury here, right, because you know, you engage in
the behavior and if it becomes routinized enough, then all
of a sudden, that part of your brain that deals
with executive function, well you don't have nearly as much
(26:46):
neural activity there because of the behavior. So even if
you wanted to quit, it makes it that much harder.
Another way that we're actually seeing the brain change here
with addiction. Twenty twelve, research from the University of North
Carolina School of Medicine, using mice in a research product,
found that a heavy alcohol use actually a rewires brain circley,
(27:10):
making it 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 you suddenly decreased
the willpower, and you're going to have harder time bouncing
back from traumatic events. And therefore, what comfort blanket do
you run to? You go to the substance that is
(27:30):
the gateway to feeling normal again. Yeah, we'll talk a
little bit more specifically about relapse in the next episode,
but when we talk about more of it, the future
of addiction. But yeah, I mean that when do people
tend to relapse, Not when things are going well, It's
when something terrible, as stressful as happening in their lives.
And again, you've got those ghosts of the neural circuitry
(27:51):
just sitting there waiting 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 talked about
when the brain forms a new habit, 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, yeah,
(28:14):
or even off of that 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 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
(28:35):
have to take something else and replace the behavior in
order to really sort of mess with the ghosts of
the neural circuitry. In fact, when we talk about habit
there are a couple of authors and researchers and m
Grable and Kyle S. Smith writing for Scientific American, and
they say that we learn in chunks, kind of like
(28:57):
if you are committing the digits of pie to your
your memory, you 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 striatum and the stritum communicates with the
midbrain where dopamine helps with learning and assigning values to
(29:18):
values to goals. And they say that these circuits create
feedback loops which help us to figure out what's working
and not working in behavior. And as we that's sort
of the point where you can be like, eh, I
don't know about this behavior, right, Like maybe your executive
functions are sort of still intact. But let's say you
keep repeating the behavior over and over again while that
(29:42):
feedback loops becomes stronger, stamping routines into these single units
or chunks. Yeah, the chunking process, which I think when
we've touched on this before, the analogy I always go
to is like hot keys. You know, instead of instead
of going through you know, go to the down menu
in a program and then go to another sub menu
(30:03):
to pull up this tool that you use all the time,
you just start using the hot key, and then the
hot key becomes such a 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 it X, then Y
and z. So that's what your brain is doing. It's
taking the shortcuts. It's an economic way of doing the
(30:25):
same task over and over again. Well, here's the crazy
thing that these researchers saw is that and they saw
this in Rats to you. By the way, they saw.
They did a ton of research on this. They saw
that chunking, that imprinting getting stronger and stronger with the
feedback loops, and eventually another system called the infralimbic system,
well it says, oh, I'll help you out here, straat,
(30:45):
and I'll help you chunk some more of these and
imprint this stuff. And so what happens is that the
infralimbics cortex begins to work in concert with dopamine and
begins to really control when we should this activity. And
it's almost like that infralimbic system becomes it's sort of
(31:07):
like this outside part of the brain going, well, okay, stratum,
if you're going to keep doing this and your loops
are going to get, you know, more and more well trenched,
then I'll go ahead and vet this behavior. And as
we talked about with Charles Dohig in 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
(31:29):
to do this, I know this, this person's this is
that person's habit, and don't I just need to give
a 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 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
(31:50):
sort of reclaim the brain? Kind of depends on agent
genetics according to the panel 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 then you can kind of go
back in the time machine and work things back out. Yeah,
(32:11):
and you're often earlier in the overall timeline of addiction too. Yeah,
so you know that working in your advantage. So basically,
the earlier you catch it, the earlier you were able
to actually get in there, and not not as much
as even turn back the clock as much as just
try to prevent going further down the road, the better
after you're going to be. If you are further down
(32:32):
the road, you've got those molecular and cellular scars that
remain on the brain. You could actually maybe have a
little injection of synthetic human growth hormone and Researchers from
Upselling University in Sweden have been doing this. They have
been looking at brain cells targeted for early death by
(32:53):
continued opiate use, and they're seeing that some of those
cells can be salvaged by this the growth hormone. Oh well, excellent.
So but 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, well,
I'll just get an injection at my brain and that'll
fix everything. Once I've I have actually put put the
(33:15):
halt on the drug use. Yeah, if you've listened to
our earlier episodes, don't pe on yourself, if you've been
stung by jellyfish, don't self trepidate, and don't inject yourself
with HGH. Yes. Yeah, all right, So there you have it.
There is a just you know, intro into the science
of addiction. What's happening in the brain, what kind of
changes are occurring, and what can be done ultimately to
(33:39):
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
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 start in the womb and going forward,
(34:02):
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 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 is a disease based model,
and the only attitude toward atticts that make sense is
(34:22):
one of compassion. I know a number of you out
there probably have experience with this topic, be it personal
experience or experience with a loved one, et cetera, and
if so, certainly reach out to us. We'd love to
hear from you on this on the science of addiction.
You can get in touch with this a number of ways,
as always good to stuff to blow your mind dot
com that's the mothership. That's so you'll find all of
(34:43):
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way that you can deliver listener mail to us is
(35:06):
by sending us an email at blow the Mind at
HowStuffWorks dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit HowStuffWorks dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey,
wasn't this stuff to blow your mind? My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie has returned to
us from New York City once a more. It's true,
and you have returned from Laryngitisville. Yes, yes for the
(00:24):
most part. Yeah, yeah, you're there. Yes. When 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. But when I
was there, I checked out this panel on something called
the craving brain. And that's what we're going to talk
(00:44):
about today, this idea of what addiction is and what
it is not. Ah, So it's about the craving brain,
not craving brains. Not that. Okay. Yeah, No zombie content,
as far as I know, is going to tumble forth
from our lips today because it's my understanding of you
showed up for this this talk expecting a light hearted
discussion about zombies. You would have been pretty disappointed. And
(01:06):
so that's what we're discussing in this episode addiction the
science of addiction, and it's really fascinating this topic because
for me, I had not really looked into it. Before
I had, I wouldn't say there's just a surface level
understanding of addiction, like I was prevy to some of
the science and some of the levels of deeper understanding
(01:27):
involved in addiction research. But 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
brain itself. We talk about this all the time. We
still don't know exactly how the brain works, and we
have more of a clue now than we did one
hundred years ago or even twenty years ago. But the
(01:49):
fact of the matter that addiction written 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 podcasts, so we could
really 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
(02:09):
in the past in the present, and what are some
of the driving conditions. Yeah, so this idea of addictive substances,
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
(02:30):
what's going on. Yeah, you know, you can say, oh,
well that person is addicted, clearly there's a flaw in
their character. Or that person is addicted, there's 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 you know, and that is
what's making them weak to this substance. And that's the
(02:51):
thing too, it's often seen, even among people who have
a better understanding it of it, it's seen as some
sort of of a weakness of character. Even know there
that we have so much science 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 it is the problem that has
(03:14):
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 logic is faulty, and 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, with
(03:36):
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 though
again that still hasn't quite seeped into every you know,
level of our culture in terms of viewing addiction in
(03:58):
those round us. Yeah, but I do think that the
more and more information that is 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. But let's talk really about what an addiction is,
because when I think about it, I think about this
irresistible urge to consume a substance or engage in a
(04:19):
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 intoxic intoxicating yourself, and
three the withdrawal or the negative effect. So you have
(04:40):
to think about addiction in that way. It's not just
I really like cremberlay and so I eat that ten
times a year. It's that you can't stop eating cremberlay
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
you're actually throwing up that crimber lay again, you're you're
(05:02):
probably not hitting all the points in the addiction. So
some of the basics here that you just alluded to,
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 it is really tied
in with the human experience. Because you mentioned the short
term goal versus short term vision versus long term problems.
(05:24):
You know that that that consonant inability in humans to
really decide on the on the long term benefit over
the short benefit benefit. And then the other thing is
that this is of course all tied in to the
pleasure centers of the brain, the reward circuit about you know,
in which we have neurotransmitters of dopamine, and it's tied
(05:46):
into the basic genetic mission of the human creature. Right,
we're getting guitting 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
into to meet that genetic mission. But when you layer
up on you know, all the complexity of cognitive evolution,
(06:06):
human culture, it gets more complicated. So suddenly we 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 have shown you get that release sometimes
even when you're you're you know, donating to charity, but
also when you're engaging in something like illicited drug use
or even even quote unquote non illicit drug use, legal
(06:29):
drug use, or even 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 bodies and 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 super normal stimuli. And we talked
(06:50):
about this how that has such a 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 heroin,
being super normal stimuli. That sense of contentment and pleasure
that you would get. Your body doesn't know whether or
(07:12):
not that's a good thing or a bad thing. It
just knows the feeling. So most drugs activate this pleasure circuitry,
this dopamine circuitry that we're talking about here. So we're
talking alcohol, we're talking nicotine, heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, cannabis. The
only things that really don't make this list are hallucinens
(07:33):
LSD and mescaline. And as a side note, food can
be an addiction to, but well, we can talk about
that pretty much any human behavior. Yeah, 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
(07:53):
amount or increase in the brain that feels like it 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 to eleven. The whole idea. You know, everyone knows
(08:15):
or thinks they know exactly what they were doing when
nine to 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 d valcohol was the presenter, by the way,
But on one hand, this sounds completely obvious, right, because
(08:36):
when one is engaging in some kind of drug, be
it a cup of coffee, a cigarette, wine, heroin, et cetera,
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.
(08:57):
So it's not just I had a cigarette and the
cigarette was 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 tease out the behavior from
the genetics, from the memory, from the environment. It's almost
(09:20):
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 effected by addiction, and they say that
these changes go beyond the brain's reward system to include
(09:40):
regions involved in memory learning, impulse control, and we'll talk
more about that later. Stress reactivity and repeated drug 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,
(10:02):
it's not just the behavior, 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
drugs or that thing, you may still have triggers that
would activate those pathways. All right, we're back. We are
(10:27):
discussing addiction, the science of addiction. We've just finished talking
about addiction, what it is, how it works, what are
some of the basics in terms of our understanding of
addiction from a disease model standpoint. And this leads to
the inevitable question who becomes addicted? Because we've seen this,
(10:48):
We see this all the time in the world around us.
It's not an equal playing field. Addiction is not an
equally equal opportunity of fender. 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 you know, packets of
(11:09):
drugs land in front of some and not others. I mean,
they're just as Addiction itself is more complex than that.
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 willpower, 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
(11:31):
sort of magic bullet 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, I genetically have stuff that has to do
(11:51):
with addiction in my family. So it may maybe that
I need six beers to your two beers to have
that same level of dope mean activity in the brain
in that sense of pleasure. So that's one way that
a person might be become addicted, because they have the
circumstances in place. And then of course we have you
(12:14):
know the environment, how much stress 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 twins. Studies
on addiction don't reveal the full reaction range of genotype, right,
(12:38):
but they do indicate that under a particular and really
relevant societal scenarios, genotype plays a substantial role in your vulnerability. Yeah,
fifty percent 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 a day,
(13:00):
can we zapt that. No, it's it's more complicated than that.
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's prone to addiction, although one day we may
be able to. But of course, it's just it's a
hard thing to answer right now, because you know, if
you were to scan a child and say you, it
(13:22):
would appear that you may become addicted to something or
you may have addictive behavior. Part of that environment is
going to factor into that. Right. So again, it's just
not that you know, cut and dried, so David Linden,
the neuroscientists and author of the Compass of Pleasure, has
some really good information out there about variants and genes
(13:43):
that turn down the function of dopamine signaling in the
brain if anybody wants to read more about that. But
we should probably talk about environments and its stressors triggering
self medicating behavior, because David Lindon says that stress hormones
are secreted by your adrenal glands that sits on top
of your kidneys, and they pass into your brain and
(14:04):
they bind stress 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
(14:25):
where we associate feeling stressful with the release of having
that cigarette, that ice cream, or of course been in
Jerry's cigarette ice cream. Yeah, and we'll talk a little
bit more about habit later on. But then you also
have other conditions like you might have PTSD, you might
have depression or ADHD, and those underlying factors could certainly
ramp up this feeling of stress, anxiety, or depression. Add
(14:50):
to this, you have teenagers who are beginning to take
on some of these substances, and their brains are pretty male.
We know this. We know that the proofnabal cortex, for instance,
the seat of judgment, doesn't even really complete itself until
the age of twenty five, in some cases much older.
(15:10):
So we know already that teenagers are at risk in
the sense that they don't have the sort of executive
functions that might stop them from engaging in risky behavior.
But moreover, there's some evidence that, say, dabbling with nicotine
with cigarettes could actually prepare their brains to become more
(15:33):
receptive to other substances. Yeah, this is really interesting research
because it deals in part with that idea 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 all heard this growing up.
(15:54):
You know, the substance, this experience is a gateway to
other experiences. It's like you know, stepping your foot into
the water, and then that undertow is going to grab
you and just drag you down through worse and worse
drug experiences into some sort of ultimate doom. And of
course people's realities tend to be you know, they say, oh, well,
you know, don't smoke cigarettes. It's a it's a it's
(16:16):
a gateway drug. And then 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 he must have been
just completely full of it and trying to scare me
with scare tactics into not trying these things. So it's
(16:36):
you know, reasons like that that you often end up
throwing the idea of a gateway drug out out the window.
But the science behind this really argues in the favor
of cigarettes, particularly serving as I almost don't want to
say gateway drug because again the term is so so bad,
but it But what is occurring here is that the
(16:59):
nicket is essentially opening up the pathways, loosening the pathway
for addictive behavior with other substances. Yeah, according to neurobiologists
Amir Levine, and he was on the panel, ninety seven
percent of cocaine users smoked first in their teenage years,
which is astounding. So he thought, well, is this is just,
(17:19):
you know, cause correlation here is there's something actually to this,
And so he and his colleagues began to look to
see if there are any long lasting changes in nicotine
use in the formative years, in the teenage years, so
whether they do. They applied mice with nicotine, followed seven
days later by cocaine, and compared with mice on cocaine
(17:41):
who had not previously received nicotine, the animals were ninety
eight percent more active and seventy eight percent more likely
to return to areas previously associated with the cocaine. Yeah,
and the reverse did not hold true. The cocaine had
no effect on nicotine induced behavior and the mind tested
in the study. Right, So this all has to do
(18:04):
with something called the foss Be gene, which is related
to addiction. And what we see is sort of a
this is sort of Blameman's terms, or I'm not going
to get too deep into it. Probably the best way
to say this is that there's a sort of a
greater expression of that gene, of that foss B gene if,
as you say that, the pathways have been loosened by nicotine.
(18:25):
So when cocaine comes along, Hey look at this, we
sort of know the drill here is what we're 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 expression of
that foss Be gene. Now, the added problem here is,
as we've talked about before, the amygdala in teenagers has
(18:47):
a heightened sense of fear and a heightened sense of
stress when you're a teenager. And amygdala 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
(19:08):
what I was a teenage teenager? I think, Yeah, I
was a teenage teenager, and so it was I think
we had mentioned then. So as an adult, you hear
a teenager talking about this and you feel like they're
just being history onic, when in fact they are actually
feeling that level of pain and discomfort. Yeah, and there
I think we discussed in that episode. One of the
things about the teenager's brain is that, from you know,
(19:30):
an evolutionary standpoint, the teenager is primed to leave his
or 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 whose genes dictate an amygdala in the
(19:53):
first place that's more reactive to stress, then you are
going to feel things a little bit stronger than your
average bear, both as a teenager and an adult. So
that makes dealing with environmental factors 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,
(20:15):
or drugs or some other you need, sex addiction, there
are so many different ways to actually try to stoke
those I guess if you 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
in many ways. Physically changes the brain of the addict,
(20:38):
and so we're going to 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 I think
(21:00):
we mentioned that more in genetics. But when you're taking
a substance 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.
(21:21):
Oh well, now you have to use more to try
and chase that original high, where you're having to drink
more 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 into things such as love,
appreciation of food, various you know, other things in life
that would give you the same dopamine effect, you feel
(21:43):
less of it. So an addict ends up feeling their
connection to the rest of the world dampened or even deadened. Uh.
And 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 cycle to begin with. Yeah,
it's terrible, right, because at first you're just chasing pleasure,
(22:03):
and then 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 also something that they hit on in
the presentation of the World Science Festival is that there's
it's easy to fall into this outsider mode of thinking
that owen attic just likes to feel good and that's
(22:25):
why they keep taking the substance in order to feel
good and to get high and to escape. Whereas 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 people think
(22:45):
you have a hangover hair in your mouth, Yeah, you
have a hangover. You've got a bunch of dog hair,
clown knows on and 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, always read about it, and you know
they're always doing that in various noir stories and all,
but yeah work. I feel like we went over this
(23:08):
in the Hangover episode we did ages ago, but I
don't recall. Oh no, 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 Times Festival is that they showed
(23:28):
the brains of a methadict, a heroin addict, and an
obese person and what they saw, again is all less
D two receptors in the brain. And they said, look,
this is also true for obesity, which is essentially food addiction.
And if you look in terms of obesity, ninety percent
of cases of severe obesity or food addiction, with only
(23:50):
ten percent of the cases of 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,
(24:12):
addiction results in more sinn apps connections. This is the
idea that the pathways to the habit forms more connections,
and then the more the substance is abused. And this
is in an area that the researcher are still trying
to fully understand what's going on here. But my understanding
based on the research materials we're looking at, is that
(24:33):
this is thought to tie in to again those drug
memories that are formed. The idea that poin one is
taking the substance, you're encoding all these memories about the
use of the substance, the environment in which the substance
is used, and that's playing into these various sinnaps connections. Yeah,
they had a great image of that and you could
see where the little synatric connections were created, and it
(24:58):
did kind of give you this idea, here's all the
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 place right on the brain saying, hey,
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 the normal snapped
(25:20):
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, it have some sort of
alien like squid. Yeah. The other thing that has affected
is your hippocampus that sort of rewired in the brains
of alcoholics. And we talk about the hippa campus. We're
talking more about memory here, So it would make sense
(25:42):
that if you're an alcoholic, a lot of your memories
aren't 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 Allcoholism Clinical and Experimental Research.
(26:04):
I've seen other papers on this too that we'll say
that the person's memory while it can suffer that the
brain sort of shuttles the hippocampus, or rather some of
the functions of the hippocampus to other parts of the
brain to try to make up for that. But what
we're talking about here is an imperfect memory, right. Also,
(26:25):
it has an effect on willpower, you know, with decreased willpower. Yeah,
so that's kind of you know, adding links some insult
to injury here, right, because you know, you engage in
the behavior and if it becomes routinized enough, then all
of a sudden, that part of your brain that deals
with executive function, well you don't have nearly as much
(26:46):
neural activity there because of the behavior. So even if
you wanted to quit, it makes it that much harder.
Another way that we're actually seeing the brain change here
with addiction. Twenty twelve, research from the University of North
Carolina School of Medicine, using mice in a research product,
found that a heavy alcohol use actually a rewires brain circley,
(27:10):
making it 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 you suddenly decreased
the willpower, and you're going to have harder time bouncing
back from traumatic events. And therefore, what comfort blanket do
you run to? You go to the substance that is
(27:30):
the gateway to feeling normal again. Yeah, we'll talk a
little bit more specifically about relapse in the next episode,
but when we talk about more of it, the future
of addiction. But yeah, I mean that when do people
tend to relapse, Not when things are going well, It's
when something terrible, as stressful as happening in their lives.
And again, you've got those ghosts of the neural circuitry
(27:51):
just sitting there waiting 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 talked about
when the brain forms a new habit, 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, yeah,
(28:14):
or even off of that 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 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
(28:35):
have to take something else and replace the behavior in
order to really sort of mess with the ghosts of
the neural circuitry. In fact, when we talk about habit
there are a couple of authors and researchers and m
Grable and Kyle S. Smith writing for Scientific American, and
they say that we learn in chunks, kind of like
(28:57):
if you are committing the digits of pie to your
your memory, you 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 striatum and the stritum communicates with the
midbrain where dopamine helps with learning and assigning values to
(29:18):
values to goals. And they say that these circuits create
feedback loops which help us to figure out what's working
and not working in behavior. And as we that's sort
of the point where you can be like, eh, I
don't know about this behavior, right, Like maybe your executive
functions are sort of still intact. But let's say you
keep repeating the behavior over and over again while that
(29:42):
feedback loops becomes stronger, stamping routines into these single units
or chunks. Yeah, the chunking process, which I think when
we've touched on this before, the analogy I always go
to is like hot keys. You know, instead of instead
of going through you know, go to the down menu
in a program and then go to another sub menu
(30:03):
to pull up this tool that you use all the time,
you just start using the hot key, and then the
hot key becomes such a 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 it X, then Y
and z. So that's what your brain is doing. It's
taking the shortcuts. It's an economic way of doing the
(30:25):
same task over and over again. Well, here's the crazy
thing that these researchers saw is that and they saw
this in Rats to you. By the way, they saw.
They did a ton of research on this. They saw
that chunking, that imprinting getting stronger and stronger with the
feedback loops, and eventually another system called the infralimbic system,
well it says, oh, I'll help you out here, straat,
(30:45):
and I'll help you chunk some more of these and
imprint this stuff. And so what happens is that the
infralimbics cortex begins to work in concert with dopamine and
begins to really control when we should this activity. And
it's almost like that infralimbic system becomes it's sort of
(31:07):
like this outside part of the brain going, well, okay, stratum,
if you're going to keep doing this and your loops
are going to get, you know, more and more well trenched,
then I'll go ahead and vet this behavior. And as
we talked about with Charles Dohig in 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
(31:29):
to do this, I know this, this person's this is
that person's habit, and don't I just need to give
a 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 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
(31:50):
sort of reclaim the brain? Kind of depends on agent
genetics according to the panel 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 then you can kind of go
back in the time machine and work things back out. Yeah,
(32:11):
and you're often earlier in the overall timeline of addiction too. Yeah,
so you know that working in your advantage. So basically,
the earlier you catch it, the earlier you were able
to actually get in there, and not not as much
as even turn back the clock as much as just
try to prevent going further down the road, the better
after you're going to be. If you are further down
(32:32):
the road, you've got those molecular and cellular scars that
remain on the brain. You could actually maybe have a
little injection of synthetic human growth hormone and Researchers from
Upselling University in Sweden have been doing this. They have
been looking at brain cells targeted for early death by
(32:53):
continued opiate use, and they're seeing that some of those
cells can be salvaged by this the growth hormone. Oh well, excellent.
So but 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, well,
I'll just get an injection at my brain and that'll
fix everything. Once I've I have actually put put the
(33:15):
halt on the drug use. Yeah, if you've listened to
our earlier episodes, don't pe on yourself, if you've been
stung by jellyfish, don't self trepidate, and don't inject yourself
with HGH. Yes. Yeah, all right, So there you have it.
There is a just you know, intro into the science
of addiction. What's happening in the brain, what kind of
changes are occurring, and what can be done ultimately to
(33:39):
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
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 start in the womb and going forward,
(34:02):
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 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 is a disease based model,
and the only attitude toward atticts that make sense is
(34:22):
one of compassion. I know a number of you out
there probably have experience with this topic, be it personal
experience or experience with a loved one, et cetera, and
if so, certainly reach out to us. We'd love to
hear from you on this on the science of addiction.
You can get in touch with this a number of ways,
as always good to stuff to blow your mind dot
com that's the mothership. That's so you'll find all of
(34:43):
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(35:06):
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