Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey,
Speaker 1: wasn't this stuff to blow your mind? My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie has returned to
Speaker 1: us from New York City once a more. It's true,
Speaker 1: and you have returned from Laryngitisville. Yes, yes for the
Speaker 1: most part. Yeah, yeah, you're there. Yes. When I was
Speaker 1: in New York, I attended the World Science Festival, which
Speaker 1: if you guys have never heard about it, you should
Speaker 1: immediately well after this episode check it out because they
Speaker 1: have some online offerings that are wonderful. But when I
Speaker 1: was there, I checked out this panel on something called
Speaker 1: the craving brain. And that's what we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about today, this idea of what addiction is and what
Speaker 1: it is not. Ah, So it's about the craving brain,
Speaker 1: not craving brains. Not that. Okay. Yeah, No zombie content,
Speaker 1: as far as I know, is going to tumble forth
Speaker 1: from our lips today because it's my understanding of you
Speaker 1: showed up for this this talk expecting a light hearted
Speaker 1: discussion about zombies. You would have been pretty disappointed. And
Speaker 1: so that's what we're discussing in this episode addiction the
Speaker 1: science of addiction, and it's really fascinating this topic because
Speaker 1: for me, I had not really looked into it. Before
Speaker 1: I had, I wouldn't say there's just a surface level
Speaker 1: understanding of addiction, like I was prevy to some of
Speaker 1: the science and some of the levels of deeper understanding
Speaker 1: involved in addiction research. But still it's so misunderstood at
Speaker 1: large in our culture even today. Yeah, and I feel
Speaker 1: like we are only now getting a baseline understanding of it,
Speaker 1: and a lot of that has to do with the
Speaker 1: brain itself. We talk about this all the time. We
Speaker 1: still don't know exactly how the brain works, and we
Speaker 1: have more of a clue now than we did one
Speaker 1: hundred years ago or even twenty years ago. But the
Speaker 1: fact of the matter that addiction written large is still
Speaker 1: going to be something that we can't fully cover in depth,
Speaker 1: and in fact, for us to do that, we would
Speaker 1: just have to become the addiction podcasts, so we could
Speaker 1: really give it its due day to talk about every
Speaker 1: single aspect. But what we want to talk about today
Speaker 1: is just sort of like this, this idea of addiction
Speaker 1: in the past in the present, and what are some
Speaker 1: of the driving conditions. Yeah, so this idea of addictive substances,
Speaker 1: you go back far enough in history and you get
Speaker 1: into it. I mean, you don't have to go far
Speaker 1: back in history at all, where our culture is full
Speaker 1: of simplistic examples of what's going on, simplistic explanations for
Speaker 1: what's going on. Yeah, you know, you can say, oh,
Speaker 1: well that person is addicted, clearly there's a flaw in
Speaker 1: their character. Or that person is addicted, there's there you know,
Speaker 1: they're completely controlled by this demonic substance. Or you can
Speaker 1: throw it to environment and say, well, they're just not
Speaker 1: in a good environment to you know, and that is
Speaker 1: what's making them weak to this substance. And that's the
Speaker 1: thing too, it's often seen, even among people who have
Speaker 1: a better understanding it of it, it's seen as some
Speaker 1: sort of of a weakness of character. Even know there
Speaker 1: that we have so much science to argue differently, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's this real need to blame someone or something when
Speaker 1: it comes to addiction. And so you had mentioned the substance, right, Oh,
Speaker 1: it's the substance that it is the problem that has
Speaker 1: demonic possession of the person. Well, if that were the case,
Speaker 1: then everybody who ever put a bottle of whiskey to
Speaker 1: their lips would be addicted to whiskey. Right, So we
Speaker 1: just know that logic is faulty, and yes, it's also
Speaker 1: looked at as a shortcoming in a person's moral compass,
Speaker 1: you know, a lack of willpower. But finally we are
Speaker 1: beginning to understand addiction in terms of a disease, with
Speaker 1: genetics and environment really playing into how the human brain
Speaker 1: can change a person's behavior. Indeed, it's that disease model
Speaker 1: of addiction that has really taken hold and become our
Speaker 1: major means of understanding exactly what's going on, even though
Speaker 1: again that still hasn't quite seeped into every you know,
Speaker 1: level of our culture in terms of viewing addiction in
Speaker 1: those round us. Yeah, but I do think that the
Speaker 1: more and more information that is that's really given to
Speaker 1: the disease brain part, the more we can understand it
Speaker 1: as a disease like diabetes or anything else that's sort
Speaker 1: of chronic. But let's talk really about what an addiction is,
Speaker 1: because when I think about it, I think about this
Speaker 1: irresistible urge to consume a substance or engage in a
Speaker 1: behavior over and over again, even though I know it's
Speaker 1: going to cause me some sort of problem later on.
Speaker 1: And it turns out there are three dimensions to addiction.
Speaker 1: Craving kind of binging to just intoxic intoxicating yourself, and
Speaker 1: three the withdrawal or the negative effect. So you have
Speaker 1: to think about addiction in that way. It's not just
Speaker 1: I really like cremberlay and so I eat that ten
Speaker 1: times a year. It's that you can't stop eating cremberlay
Speaker 1: even though you keep throwing it up. Yeah. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: some people may you know, jokingly say oh, I'm addicted
Speaker 1: to this, that or the other. But unless it's unless
Speaker 1: you're actually throwing up that crimber lay again, you're you're
Speaker 1: probably not hitting all the points in the addiction. So
Speaker 1: some of the basics here that you just alluded to,
Speaker 1: we've discussed many times just in terms of what it
Speaker 1: is to be human, and that's that's one of the
Speaker 1: interesting things about addiction is that it is really tied
Speaker 1: in with the human experience. Because you mentioned the short
Speaker 1: term goal versus short term vision versus long term problems.
Speaker 1: You know that that that consonant inability in humans to
Speaker 1: really decide on the on the long term benefit over
Speaker 1: the short benefit benefit. And then the other thing is
Speaker 1: that this is of course all tied in to the
Speaker 1: pleasure centers of the brain, the reward circuit about you know,
Speaker 1: in which we have neurotransmitters of dopamine, and it's tied
Speaker 1: into the basic genetic mission of the human creature. Right,
Speaker 1: we're getting guitting this pleasure, and the pleasure is a
Speaker 1: reward for things like eating, drinking, mating, the very basic
Speaker 1: things that we have to check check off the list
Speaker 1: into to meet that genetic mission. But when you layer
Speaker 1: up on you know, all the complexity of cognitive evolution,
Speaker 1: human culture, it gets more complicated. So suddenly we have
Speaker 1: all these other different activities that can end up releasing dopamine.
Speaker 1: I mean everything from eating and drinking and mating to
Speaker 1: going shopping. Studies have shown you get that release sometimes
Speaker 1: even when you're you're you know, donating to charity, but
Speaker 1: also when you're engaging in something like illicited drug use
Speaker 1: or even even quote unquote non illicit drug use, legal
Speaker 1: drug use, or even just a you know, a cup
Speaker 1: of coffee in the morning. Yeah, I mean to put
Speaker 1: it really simply, pleasure is tied into our survival. It's
Speaker 1: the way that our bodies and our minds are wired.
Speaker 1: And so when you think about these different things that
Speaker 1: we become addicted to, you can kind of think about
Speaker 1: them in terms of super normal stimuli. And we talked
Speaker 1: about this how that has such a pull on us,
Speaker 1: because that's that thing just kind of like with lights
Speaker 1: blinking around it, saying, hey, this is awesome. You should
Speaker 1: try me. If you get pleasure from me, you should
Speaker 1: do it again. And in this way, you could think
Speaker 1: of a drug as being a sort of like heroin,
Speaker 1: being super normal stimuli. That sense of contentment and pleasure
Speaker 1: that you would get. Your body doesn't know whether or
Speaker 1: not that's a good thing or a bad thing. It
Speaker 1: just knows the feeling. So most drugs activate this pleasure circuitry,
Speaker 1: this dopamine circuitry that we're talking about here. So we're
Speaker 1: talking alcohol, we're talking nicotine, heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, cannabis. The
Speaker 1: only things that really don't make this list are hallucinens
Speaker 1: LSD and mescaline. And as a side note, food can
Speaker 1: be an addiction to, but well, we can talk about
Speaker 1: that pretty much any human behavior. Yeah, so let's say
Speaker 1: that you have you know, a glass of wine. There's
Speaker 1: that reward that occurs in the brain. You get a
Speaker 1: flood of dopamine or I shouldn't say a flood, because
Speaker 1: it's not an actual flood, but you get a significant
Speaker 1: amount or increase in the brain that feels like it flood,
Speaker 1: and that strengthens the neural pathways the memory of the behavior,
Speaker 1: making it far easier to recall the pleasure and then
Speaker 1: engage in that behavior again and again. Yeah, this is interesting.
Speaker 1: One of the presenters at the World Science Festival mentioned
Speaker 1: nine to eleven. The whole idea. You know, everyone knows
Speaker 1: or thinks they know exactly what they were doing when
Speaker 1: nine to eleven occurred, like that strong memory, that that
Speaker 1: sort of pillar standing up standing out from the landscape
Speaker 1: of our existing memories, and drug memories are like that.
Speaker 1: Nor a d valcohol was the presenter, by the way,
Speaker 1: But on one hand, this sounds completely obvious, right, because
Speaker 1: when one is engaging in some kind of drug, be
Speaker 1: it a cup of coffee, a cigarette, wine, heroin, et cetera,
Speaker 1: we're dealing with a heightened level level of pleasure, and therefore,
Speaker 1: conceivably that is a more memorable moment, right, you're feeling
Speaker 1: really good at that moment, and therefore your brain is
Speaker 1: encoding that memory and all the very stimuli around it.
Speaker 1: So it's not just I had a cigarette and the
Speaker 1: cigarette was enjoyable and was pleasurable, but I had a
Speaker 1: cigarette at a bar, I had a cigarette among this
Speaker 1: group of people, this song was playing. All this stuff
Speaker 1: sort of gets encoded into the memory. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: the thing that makes us really complicated in the sense
Speaker 1: because it's very hard to tease out the behavior from
Speaker 1: the genetics, from the memory, from the environment. It's almost
Speaker 1: like all of these have a bit of play into addiction.
Speaker 1: And according to the National Institute of Health, you can
Speaker 1: see that with brain imaging technology that addiction is disrupting
Speaker 1: specific brain circuits effected by addiction, and they say that
Speaker 1: these changes go beyond the brain's reward system to include
Speaker 1: regions involved in memory learning, impulse control, and we'll talk
Speaker 1: more about that later. Stress reactivity and repeated drug exposure
Speaker 1: resets these circuits toward compulsive behavior, so that a person's
Speaker 1: control over the desire to seek and use drugs is compromised,
Speaker 1: despite whatever consequences arise. So I thought that was interesting. Again,
Speaker 1: it's not just the behavior, it's that it's creating these
Speaker 1: kind of neural pathways, these sort of ghosts in the
Speaker 1: machine of your brain. So even if you abstain from
Speaker 1: drugs or that thing, you may still have triggers that
Speaker 1: would activate those pathways. All right, we're back. We are
Speaker 1: discussing addiction, the science of addiction. We've just finished talking
Speaker 1: about addiction, what it is, how it works, what are
Speaker 1: some of the basics in terms of our understanding of
Speaker 1: addiction from a disease model standpoint. And this leads to
Speaker 1: the inevitable question who becomes addicted? Because we've seen this,
Speaker 1: We see this all the time in the world around us.
Speaker 1: It's not an equal playing field. Addiction is not an
Speaker 1: equally equal opportunity of fender. Some people have more of
Speaker 1: a problem with it than others. And how do we
Speaker 1: figure that out? Like what's going on there? We can't
Speaker 1: just say it's you know, God shooting lightning bolts of
Speaker 1: addiction down at people and making you know, packets of
Speaker 1: drugs land in front of some and not others. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're just as Addiction itself is more complex than that.
Speaker 1: Who becomes an addict is also a fairly complex situation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and of course the older model would be, oh, it's
Speaker 1: the person who has no willpower, it's the person who
Speaker 1: just doesn't have any integrity. And we know this is
Speaker 1: not true. We know that addiction is not any one
Speaker 1: sort of magic bullet that arrives in a person's chest.
Speaker 1: You could have a genetic disposition which would cause you
Speaker 1: to have a blunted reaction to dopamine, and that would
Speaker 1: require more and more of the substance to produce the
Speaker 1: same sense of pleasure in someone else. So in other words,
Speaker 1: for me, I genetically have stuff that has to do
Speaker 1: with addiction in my family. So it may maybe that
Speaker 1: I need six beers to your two beers to have
Speaker 1: that same level of dope mean activity in the brain
Speaker 1: in that sense of pleasure. So that's one way that
Speaker 1: a person might be become addicted, because they have the
Speaker 1: circumstances in place. And then of course we have you
Speaker 1: know the environment, how much stress is in that environment,
Speaker 1: and we also have the way that the brain develops.
Speaker 1: So genetics, let's talk about this real quick. Studies of
Speaker 1: identical twins indicate that as much as half of an
Speaker 1: individual's risk of becoming addicted to nicotine, alcohol, or other
Speaker 1: drugs depends on his or her genes and twins. Studies
Speaker 1: on addiction don't reveal the full reaction range of genotype, right,
Speaker 1: but they do indicate that under a particular and really
Speaker 1: relevant societal scenarios, genotype plays a substantial role in your vulnerability. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fifty percent is pretty impressive because that is that is
Speaker 1: higher than some cancers in terms of how much genetics
Speaker 1: is playing a role. Now, it's also not as simple
Speaker 1: as saying, oh, well, here's the gene for a day,
Speaker 1: can we zapt that. No, it's it's more complicated than that.
Speaker 1: We're not at the point yet where we can just
Speaker 1: say we can look at somebody and do some sort
Speaker 1: of funny little scan or blood test and say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this person's prone to addiction, although one day we may
Speaker 1: be able to. But of course, it's just it's a
Speaker 1: hard thing to answer right now, because you know, if
Speaker 1: you were to scan a child and say you, it
Speaker 1: would appear that you may become addicted to something or
Speaker 1: you may have addictive behavior. Part of that environment is
Speaker 1: going to factor into that. Right. So again, it's just
Speaker 1: not that you know, cut and dried, so David Linden,
Speaker 1: the neuroscientists and author of the Compass of Pleasure, has
Speaker 1: some really good information out there about variants and genes
Speaker 1: that turn down the function of dopamine signaling in the
Speaker 1: brain if anybody wants to read more about that. But
Speaker 1: we should probably talk about environments and its stressors triggering
Speaker 1: self medicating behavior, because David Lindon says that stress hormones
Speaker 1: are secreted by your adrenal glands that sits on top
Speaker 1: of your kidneys, and they pass into your brain and
Speaker 1: they bind stress hormone receptors on neurons in your pleasure circuit,
Speaker 1: and they set in motion a series of biochemical steps
Speaker 1: that end with you, say, having a bowl of ice
Speaker 1: cream or smoking a cigarette, essentially anything that's pleasurable to
Speaker 1: try to negate the stress chemical reaction happening in your body. Right,
Speaker 1: and then we eventually end up encoding the habit right
Speaker 1: where we associate feeling stressful with the release of having
Speaker 1: that cigarette, that ice cream, or of course been in
Speaker 1: Jerry's cigarette ice cream. Yeah, and we'll talk a little
Speaker 1: bit more about habit later on. But then you also
Speaker 1: have other conditions like you might have PTSD, you might
Speaker 1: have depression or ADHD, and those underlying factors could certainly
Speaker 1: ramp up this feeling of stress, anxiety, or depression. Add
Speaker 1: to this, you have teenagers who are beginning to take
Speaker 1: on some of these substances, and their brains are pretty male.
Speaker 1: We know this. We know that the proofnabal cortex, for instance,
Speaker 1: the seat of judgment, doesn't even really complete itself until
Speaker 1: the age of twenty five, in some cases much older.
Speaker 1: So we know already that teenagers are at risk in
Speaker 1: the sense that they don't have the sort of executive
Speaker 1: functions that might stop them from engaging in risky behavior.
Speaker 1: But moreover, there's some evidence that, say, dabbling with nicotine
Speaker 1: with cigarettes could actually prepare their brains to become more
Speaker 1: receptive to other substances. Yeah, this is really interesting research
Speaker 1: because it deals in part with that idea of something
Speaker 1: as a gateway substance, as a gateway drug, which is
Speaker 1: a term that has really lost a lot of value,
Speaker 1: I feel, thanks to its overuse in drug war campaigning,
Speaker 1: because because you know, we all heard this growing up.
Speaker 1: You know, the substance, this experience is a gateway to
Speaker 1: other experiences. It's like you know, stepping your foot into
Speaker 1: the water, and then that undertow is going to grab
Speaker 1: you and just drag you down through worse and worse
Speaker 1: drug experiences into some sort of ultimate doom. And of
Speaker 1: course people's realities tend to be you know, they say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, don't smoke cigarettes. It's a it's a it's
Speaker 1: a gateway drug. And then when one eventually tries a
Speaker 1: cigarette and they realize, hey, my life didn't just end.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't feel the world collapsing around me.
Speaker 1: I don't feel that undertow dragging me down. Therefore this
Speaker 1: can't be that bad. And those he must have been
Speaker 1: just completely full of it and trying to scare me
Speaker 1: with scare tactics into not trying these things. So it's
Speaker 1: you know, reasons like that that you often end up
Speaker 1: throwing the idea of a gateway drug out out the window.
Speaker 1: But the science behind this really argues in the favor
Speaker 1: of cigarettes, particularly serving as I almost don't want to
Speaker 1: say gateway drug because again the term is so so bad,
Speaker 1: but it But what is occurring here is that the
Speaker 1: nicket is essentially opening up the pathways, loosening the pathway
Speaker 1: for addictive behavior with other substances. Yeah, according to neurobiologists
Speaker 1: Amir Levine, and he was on the panel, ninety seven
Speaker 1: percent of cocaine users smoked first in their teenage years,
Speaker 1: which is astounding. So he thought, well, is this is just,
Speaker 1: you know, cause correlation here is there's something actually to this,
Speaker 1: And so he and his colleagues began to look to
Speaker 1: see if there are any long lasting changes in nicotine
Speaker 1: use in the formative years, in the teenage years, so
Speaker 1: whether they do. They applied mice with nicotine, followed seven
Speaker 1: days later by cocaine, and compared with mice on cocaine
Speaker 1: who had not previously received nicotine, the animals were ninety
Speaker 1: eight percent more active and seventy eight percent more likely
Speaker 1: to return to areas previously associated with the cocaine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the reverse did not hold true. The cocaine had
Speaker 1: no effect on nicotine induced behavior and the mind tested
Speaker 1: in the study. Right, So this all has to do
Speaker 1: with something called the foss Be gene, which is related
Speaker 1: to addiction. And what we see is sort of a
Speaker 1: this is sort of Blameman's terms, or I'm not going
Speaker 1: to get too deep into it. Probably the best way
Speaker 1: to say this is that there's a sort of a
Speaker 1: greater expression of that gene, of that foss B gene if,
Speaker 1: as you say that, the pathways have been loosened by nicotine.
Speaker 1: So when cocaine comes along, Hey look at this, we
Speaker 1: sort of know the drill here is what we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it loosens up the DNA packaging system. That's that's involved here,
Speaker 1: and it's in it, and it allows greater expression of
Speaker 1: that foss Be gene. Now, the added problem here is,
Speaker 1: as we've talked about before, the amygdala in teenagers has
Speaker 1: a heightened sense of fear and a heightened sense of
Speaker 1: stress when you're a teenager. And amygdala is so interesting
Speaker 1: to me because it processes both physical pain and emotional pain.
Speaker 1: So if you're a teenager and you're brooding, you really
Speaker 1: may feel like life is terrible, life is ending, you're
Speaker 1: being hurt. Yeah, we did that whole episode on the
Speaker 1: what I was a teenage teenager? I think, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was a teenage teenager, and so it was I think
Speaker 1: we had mentioned then. So as an adult, you hear
Speaker 1: a teenager talking about this and you feel like they're
Speaker 1: just being history onic, when in fact they are actually
Speaker 1: feeling that level of pain and discomfort. Yeah, and there
Speaker 1: I think we discussed in that episode. One of the
Speaker 1: things about the teenager's brain is that, from you know,
Speaker 1: an evolutionary standpoint, the teenager is primed to leave his
Speaker 1: or her community and find a new community in which
Speaker 1: to thrive, which means that there's an increased dependence on
Speaker 1: social pressures, on fitting in with a social group, because that,
Speaker 1: in an evolutionary sense, means survival. And you know, to
Speaker 1: add more fuel to the fire, if you happen to
Speaker 1: be that person whose genes dictate an amygdala in the
Speaker 1: first place that's more reactive to stress, then you are
Speaker 1: going to feel things a little bit stronger than your
Speaker 1: average bear, both as a teenager and an adult. So
Speaker 1: that makes dealing with environmental factors emotions a lot harder.
Speaker 1: And you can see how people begin to turn to
Speaker 1: things to comfort themselves, right, whether it be food or smoking,
Speaker 1: or drugs or some other you need, sex addiction, there
Speaker 1: are so many different ways to actually try to stoke
Speaker 1: those I guess if you call them members of pleasure
Speaker 1: and content. Now, an important thing to keep in mind
Speaker 1: about about addiction is that it actually changes the brain
Speaker 1: in many ways. Physically changes the brain of the addict,
Speaker 1: and so we're going to run through some of the
Speaker 1: changes that are happening here. Yeah, we mentioned that there
Speaker 1: is a loss of dopamine receptors in the brains of
Speaker 1: addicts as D two receptors, So again you would see
Speaker 1: that it takes more dopamine to get that same sort
Speaker 1: of level in your brain of pleasure. And I think
Speaker 1: we mentioned that more in genetics. But when you're taking
Speaker 1: a substance repeatedly, of course you're going to have some
Speaker 1: changes in your dopamine receptors. And what's interesting here too
Speaker 1: is that it's not not just the dopamine receptors as
Speaker 1: affected by the drug, because that's kind of an obvious,
Speaker 1: almost a cliche that we understand with with drug addiction.
Speaker 1: Oh well, now you have to use more to try
Speaker 1: and chase that original high, where you're having to drink
Speaker 1: more to to to to reach the same level that
Speaker 1: you're reaching previously. But it also bleeds over to other
Speaker 1: areas of the dopamine experience into things such as love,
Speaker 1: appreciation of food, various you know, other things in life
Speaker 1: that would give you the same dopamine effect, you feel
Speaker 1: less of it. So an addict ends up feeling their
Speaker 1: connection to the rest of the world dampened or even deadened. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and the easiest way to feel normal again in
Speaker 1: regards to those connections is to turn back to that
Speaker 1: drug that's warped the dopamine cycle to begin with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's terrible, right, because at first you're just chasing pleasure,
Speaker 1: and then that the effects of that substance have taken
Speaker 1: such a toll that you're just trying to chase a
Speaker 1: sort of equilibrium. Yeah, that's an important thing to keep
Speaker 1: in mind. And also something that they hit on in
Speaker 1: the presentation of the World Science Festival is that there's
Speaker 1: it's easy to fall into this outsider mode of thinking
Speaker 1: that owen attic just likes to feel good and that's
Speaker 1: why they keep taking the substance in order to feel
Speaker 1: good and to get high and to escape. Whereas to
Speaker 1: your point, it eventually becomes not about feeling good and
Speaker 1: about recreation, it's about treating self medicating their own illness.
Speaker 1: Really well, anybody who has experienced the hair of the
Speaker 1: dog the next day, right, you know, let people think
Speaker 1: you have a hangover hair in your mouth, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have a hangover. You've got a bunch of dog hair,
Speaker 1: clown knows on and you don't know what happened. No,
Speaker 1: actually you wake up and you say, I'll just have
Speaker 1: a beer to sort of reset myself. I've always wondered
Speaker 1: if that works, always read about it, and you know
Speaker 1: they're always doing that in various noir stories and all,
Speaker 1: but yeah work. I feel like we went over this
Speaker 1: in the Hangover episode we did ages ago, but I
Speaker 1: don't recall. Oh no, it's been so long since I
Speaker 1: engaged in that. I feel like I probably did it.
Speaker 1: And then, you know, probably later that night had more
Speaker 1: of whatever like wine, and then felt terrible again, and
Speaker 1: then woke up again and again. You see how this
Speaker 1: all plays out. What I thought was interesting about the
Speaker 1: panel at the World Times Festival is that they showed
Speaker 1: the brains of a methadict, a heroin addict, and an
Speaker 1: obese person and what they saw, again is all less
Speaker 1: D two receptors in the brain. And they said, look,
Speaker 1: this is also true for obesity, which is essentially food addiction.
Speaker 1: And if you look in terms of obesity, ninety percent
Speaker 1: of cases of severe obesity or food addiction, with only
Speaker 1: ten percent of the cases of severe obesity having to
Speaker 1: do with a metabolic defect. Again, some of this bleeds
Speaker 1: over to this other area. When we talk about obesity,
Speaker 1: we tend to judge the person in the willpower right
Speaker 1: or the lack of willpower, when what we're seeing here
Speaker 1: is the habit becoming so ingrained. Another way, the brain changes,
Speaker 1: addiction results in more sinn apps connections. This is the
Speaker 1: idea that the pathways to the habit forms more connections,
Speaker 1: and then the more the substance is abused. And this
Speaker 1: is in an area that the researcher are still trying
Speaker 1: to fully understand what's going on here. But my understanding
Speaker 1: based on the research materials we're looking at, is that
Speaker 1: this is thought to tie in to again those drug
Speaker 1: memories that are formed. The idea that poin one is
Speaker 1: taking the substance, you're encoding all these memories about the
Speaker 1: use of the substance, the environment in which the substance
Speaker 1: is used, and that's playing into these various sinnaps connections. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they had a great image of that and you could
Speaker 1: see where the little synatric connections were created, and it
Speaker 1: did kind of give you this idea, here's all the
Speaker 1: stuff that's being created so that you can have a sticky,
Speaker 1: sticky memory of the path to get back to the
Speaker 1: behavior or the addiction. Yeah, sticky memory in a sense,
Speaker 1: it's like a sticky place right on the brain saying, hey,
Speaker 1: this is the way to feel good right here. Well,
Speaker 1: it's kind of and it was sort of a terrifying
Speaker 1: image too, because I sort of showed the normal snapped
Speaker 1: the connection there and then this other sort of thing
Speaker 1: that shows up and it had sound effects to remember
Speaker 1: it kind of went right, it have some sort of
Speaker 1: alien like squid. Yeah. The other thing that has affected
Speaker 1: is your hippocampus that sort of rewired in the brains
Speaker 1: of alcoholics. And we talk about the hippa campus. We're
Speaker 1: talking more about memory here, So it would make sense
Speaker 1: that if you're an alcoholic, a lot of your memories
Speaker 1: aren't going to be stored in the same way or
Speaker 1: even committed long term in the same way. And what
Speaker 1: has been found is that heavy drinking can reduce total
Speaker 1: hippocampus volume, and that was reported in the November two
Speaker 1: thousand and six issue of Allcoholism Clinical and Experimental Research.
Speaker 1: I've seen other papers on this too that we'll say
Speaker 1: that the person's memory while it can suffer that the
Speaker 1: brain sort of shuttles the hippocampus, or rather some of
Speaker 1: the functions of the hippocampus to other parts of the
Speaker 1: brain to try to make up for that. But what
Speaker 1: we're talking about here is an imperfect memory, right. Also,
Speaker 1: it has an effect on willpower, you know, with decreased willpower. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's kind of you know, adding links some insult
Speaker 1: to injury here, right, because you know, you engage in
Speaker 1: the behavior and if it becomes routinized enough, then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, that part of your brain that deals
Speaker 1: with executive function, well you don't have nearly as much
Speaker 1: neural activity there because of the behavior. So even if
Speaker 1: you wanted to quit, it makes it that much harder.
Speaker 1: Another way that we're actually seeing the brain change here
Speaker 1: with addiction. Twenty twelve, research from the University of North
Speaker 1: Carolina School of Medicine, using mice in a research product,
Speaker 1: found that a heavy alcohol use actually a rewires brain circley,
Speaker 1: making it get harder for alcoholics to recover psychologically following
Speaker 1: a traumatic experience, which again feels like another kick in
Speaker 1: the gut to this overall situation because you suddenly decreased
Speaker 1: the willpower, and you're going to have harder time bouncing
Speaker 1: back from traumatic events. And therefore, what comfort blanket do
Speaker 1: you run to? You go to the substance that is
Speaker 1: the gateway to feeling normal again. Yeah, we'll talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more specifically about relapse in the next episode,
Speaker 1: but when we talk about more of it, the future
Speaker 1: of addiction. But yeah, I mean that when do people
Speaker 1: tend to relapse, Not when things are going well, It's
Speaker 1: when something terrible, as stressful as happening in their lives.
Speaker 1: And again, you've got those ghosts of the neural circuitry
Speaker 1: just sitting there waiting to be activated. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: when we were discussing habits in one of our habit
Speaker 1: episodes for around the year's time, I think talked about
Speaker 1: when the brain forms a new habit, it's like a road. Okay,
Speaker 1: you have a two lane highway going from point A
Speaker 1: to point B. When you want to build a new road,
Speaker 1: you have to build next to that existing road, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: or even off of that existing road. So maybe you
Speaker 1: have the new four lane highway over here, but that
Speaker 1: two lane highway is still there. The brain still knows
Speaker 1: where it is and it has to, or if it
Speaker 1: thinks it has to, it will take that road. That's right.
Speaker 1: So if that road is that you take a drink
Speaker 1: at six pm and that's when all of this would
Speaker 1: begin these triggers, then you just take the other road.
Speaker 1: Maybe you go and work out at six pm. You
Speaker 1: have to take something else and replace the behavior in
Speaker 1: order to really sort of mess with the ghosts of
Speaker 1: the neural circuitry. In fact, when we talk about habit
Speaker 1: there are a couple of authors and researchers and m
Speaker 1: Grable and Kyle S. Smith writing for Scientific American, and
Speaker 1: they say that we learn in chunks, kind of like
Speaker 1: if you are committing the digits of pie to your
Speaker 1: your memory, you would probably do them in chunks, like
Speaker 1: say seven digits, right, And they're saying the same thing
Speaker 1: happens with habits. And this happens when the prefrontal cortex
Speaker 1: communicates with a striatum and the stritum communicates with the
Speaker 1: midbrain where dopamine helps with learning and assigning values to
Speaker 1: values to goals. And they say that these circuits create
Speaker 1: feedback loops which help us to figure out what's working
Speaker 1: and not working in behavior. And as we that's sort
Speaker 1: of the point where you can be like, eh, I
Speaker 1: don't know about this behavior, right, Like maybe your executive
Speaker 1: functions are sort of still intact. But let's say you
Speaker 1: keep repeating the behavior over and over again while that
Speaker 1: feedback loops becomes stronger, stamping routines into these single units
Speaker 1: or chunks. Yeah, the chunking process, which I think when
Speaker 1: we've touched on this before, the analogy I always go
Speaker 1: to is like hot keys. You know, instead of instead
Speaker 1: of going through you know, go to the down menu
Speaker 1: in a program and then go to another sub menu
Speaker 1: to pull up this tool that you use all the time,
Speaker 1: you just start using the hot key, and then the
Speaker 1: hot key becomes such a habit you forget how to
Speaker 1: find it elsewhere. You may even forget what the hot
Speaker 1: key is. You just have the muscle memory of hitting it.
Speaker 1: And this you see the same thing in various programming,
Speaker 1: right and where the program is it X, then Y
Speaker 1: and z. So that's what your brain is doing. It's
Speaker 1: taking the shortcuts. It's an economic way of doing the
Speaker 1: same task over and over again. Well, here's the crazy
Speaker 1: thing that these researchers saw is that and they saw
Speaker 1: this in Rats to you. By the way, they saw.
Speaker 1: They did a ton of research on this. They saw
Speaker 1: that chunking, that imprinting getting stronger and stronger with the
Speaker 1: feedback loops, and eventually another system called the infralimbic system,
Speaker 1: well it says, oh, I'll help you out here, straat,
Speaker 1: and I'll help you chunk some more of these and
Speaker 1: imprint this stuff. And so what happens is that the
Speaker 1: infralimbics cortex begins to work in concert with dopamine and
Speaker 1: begins to really control when we should this activity. And
Speaker 1: it's almost like that infralimbic system becomes it's sort of
Speaker 1: like this outside part of the brain going, well, okay, stratum,
Speaker 1: if you're going to keep doing this and your loops
Speaker 1: are going to get, you know, more and more well trenched,
Speaker 1: then I'll go ahead and vet this behavior. And as
Speaker 1: we talked about with Charles Dohig in his book about habits,
Speaker 1: at some point habits become so ingrained that your prefrontal
Speaker 1: cortex is just like, you know what, I don't need
Speaker 1: to do this, I know this, this person's this is
Speaker 1: that person's habit, and don't I just need to give
Speaker 1: a radio silent here because the rest of the brain
Speaker 1: knows what to do now and pick up All right,
Speaker 1: so I know what everyone's wondering at this point. Is
Speaker 1: all this damage we've we've talked about the changes that
Speaker 1: occurring to the brain of the damage. Is it reversible?
Speaker 1: Can you actually turn back the clock on this and
Speaker 1: sort of reclaim the brain? Kind of depends on agent
Speaker 1: genetics according to the panel from the World Science Festival,
Speaker 1: and the level of neural plasticities. So, hey, if you're
Speaker 1: younger and you catch this, well obviously the damage to
Speaker 1: your brain can be then you can kind of go
Speaker 1: back in the time machine and work things back out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you're often earlier in the overall timeline of addiction too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know that working in your advantage. So basically,
Speaker 1: the earlier you catch it, the earlier you were able
Speaker 1: to actually get in there, and not not as much
Speaker 1: as even turn back the clock as much as just
Speaker 1: try to prevent going further down the road, the better
Speaker 1: after you're going to be. If you are further down
Speaker 1: the road, you've got those molecular and cellular scars that
Speaker 1: remain on the brain. You could actually maybe have a
Speaker 1: little injection of synthetic human growth hormone and Researchers from
Speaker 1: Upselling University in Sweden have been doing this. They have
Speaker 1: been looking at brain cells targeted for early death by
Speaker 1: continued opiate use, and they're seeing that some of those
Speaker 1: cells can be salvaged by this the growth hormone. Oh well, excellent.
Speaker 1: So but you know who knows sort of what the
Speaker 1: side effects are that and that's yeah, certainly down the road.
Speaker 1: Don't head your bets on that and say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I'll just get an injection at my brain and that'll
Speaker 1: fix everything. Once I've I have actually put put the
Speaker 1: halt on the drug use. Yeah, if you've listened to
Speaker 1: our earlier episodes, don't pe on yourself, if you've been
Speaker 1: stung by jellyfish, don't self trepidate, and don't inject yourself
Speaker 1: with HGH. Yes. Yeah, all right, So there you have it.
Speaker 1: There is a just you know, intro into the science
Speaker 1: of addiction. What's happening in the brain, what kind of
Speaker 1: changes are occurring, and what can be done ultimately to
Speaker 1: reverse some of this damage and put a stamp on it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And David Lyndon said something very interesting to Terry Gross
Speaker 1: when he was on her show and he was talking
Speaker 1: about his book, The Compass of Pleasure. He said, when
Speaker 1: you understand the biology of the pleasure circuit, and when
Speaker 1: you understand how the contribution of genetics and stress and
Speaker 1: life experience actually even start in the womb and going forward,
Speaker 1: all come together. The end result is that you have
Speaker 1: to realize that any one of us, any one of us,
Speaker 1: could be an addict at any time. Addiction is not
Speaker 1: fundamentally a moral failing. It's not a disease of weak
Speaker 1: willed losers. When you look at the biology, the only
Speaker 1: model of addiction that makes sense is a disease based model,
Speaker 1: and the only attitude toward atticts that make sense is
Speaker 1: one of compassion. I know a number of you out
Speaker 1: there probably have experience with this topic, be it personal
Speaker 1: experience or experience with a loved one, et cetera, and
Speaker 1: if so, certainly reach out to us. We'd love to
Speaker 1: hear from you on this on the science of addiction.
Speaker 1: You can get in touch with this a number of ways,
Speaker 1: as always good to stuff to blow your mind dot
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