The Science of Addiction

It's true, you have returned from Laryngitisville. Yes, yes, for the most part. Yeah, yeah, you're there. Um. 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. Like when I was there, I checked out this panel on something

called the craving brain. And that's what we're going to talk about today, this idea of what addiction is and what it is not. So it's it's about the craving brain, not craving brains. Not that. Yeah. No zombie content, as far as I know, is going to tumble forth from our lips today because it's my understanding, if you showed up for this, uh, this talk expecting a light hireded discussion about zombies, you would have been pretty disappointed. And

so that's what we're discussing in this episode. Addiction, the science of addiction and uh and it's it's really fascinating this topic because for me, I had not really looked into it. Before I had, I wouldn't say this just a surface level understanding of addiction, Like I was pretty to some of the science and some of the the levels of deeper understanding involved in addiction research. But but

still it's so misunderstood at large in our culture even today. Yeah, and I feel like we are only now getting a baseline understanding of it. And a lot of that has to do with the in itself. We talked about this all the time, like we still don't know exactly how the brain works, and we have more of a clue now than we did a hundred years ago or even

twenty years ago. Um, But the fact of the matter that addiction at large is still going to be something that we can't fully cover in depth, and in fact, for us to do that, we would just have to become the addiction podcast, so we could really um give it its due day to talk about every single aspect. But what we want to talk about today is just sort of like this, this idea of addiction in the past and the present and what are some of the

driving conditions. So this idea of addictive substances, Um, you go back far enough in history and you get into it. I mean, you don't have to go far back in history at all, where our culture is full of simplistic examples of what's going on, simplistic explanations for what's going on. You know, you can say, oh, well, that person is addicted. Clearly there's a flaw on their character, or that person is addicted, there's a there you know, they're completely controlled

by this demonic substance. Or you can throw it to environment and say, well, they're just not in a good environment to uh you know, and that is what's making them weak to this substance. And that's the thing too. It's often seen, even even among people who have a better understanding it of it, it's seen as some sort of of of a weakness of character, even though there that we have so much science to to argue differently. Yeah, there's this real need to blame someone or something when

it comes to addiction. And so you had mentioned the substance, right, Oh, it's the substance that is the problem that has deminutic, demonic possession of the person. Well, if that were the case, then everybody who ever put a bottle of whiskey to their lips would be addicted to whiskey. Right, So we just know that that logic is faulty, and um, yes, it's also looked at as a shortcoming in a person's

moral compass, you know, a lack of willpower. But finally we are beginning to understand addiction in terms of a disease, with genetics and environment really playing into how the human brain can change a person's behavior. Indeed, it's that disease model of addiction that has really taken hold and become our major means of understanding exactly what's going on, even even though again that still hasn't quite seeped into every uh you know, level of our culture in terms of

viewing addiction in those round us. Yeah, but I do think that the more and more information that is um that's really given to the disease brain part, the more we can understand it as a disease like diabetes or anything else that's sort of chronic. Um. But let's talk really about what an addiction is, because when I think about it, I think about this irresistible urge to consume a substance or engage in a behavior over and over again, even though I know it's going to cause me some

sort of problem later on. And it turns out there are three dimensions to addiction. Craving kind of binging to just in toxic intoxicating yourself, and three the withdrawal or the negative effect. So you have to think about addiction in that way. It's not just I really like uh cremblay and so I eat that ten times a year. It's that you can't stop eating kremblay even though you keep throwing it up. Yeah. Yeah, there's some people, may you know, jokingly say oh I'm addicted to this, that

or the other. But unless it's unless're actually throwing up that crember lay again, you're you're you're probably not hitting all the other points in the addiction. So some of the basics here that you you just alluded to. Um, we've discussed many times just in terms of what it is to be human. And that's that's one of the interesting things about addiction is that is really tied in

with the human experience. Um. Because you mentioned the short term goal versus short term vision versus long term problems. You know that that that constant and ability in humans to really decide on the on the long term benefit over the short come benefit benefit. And then the other thing is that this is of course all um tied in to the pleasure centers of of the in the reward circuit about you know, in which we have neurotransmitters of dopamine, and it's tied into the basic genetic mission

of the human creature. Right. Uh, we're getting getting this pleasure, and the pleasure is a reward for things like eating, drinking, mating, the very basic things that we have to check check off the list in terms to meet that genetic mission. But when you layer up on you know, all the complexity of cognitive evolution human culture, it gets more complicated. So suddenly have all these other different activities that can end up releasing dopamine. I mean everything from eating and

drinking and mating to going shopping. Studies of showing you get that release sometimes even when you're you're you know, donating to charity, uh, but also when you're engaging in something like illicit drug use, or even even quote unquote non illicit drug use, legal drug use, or or even just a you know, a cup of coffee in the morning. Yeah. I mean to put it really simply, pleasure is tied into our survival. It's the way that our our bodies,

in our minds are wired. And so when you think about these different things that we become addicted to, you can kind of think about them in terms of supernormal stimuli. And we talked about this how that has such a pull on us, because that's that thing just kind of like with lights blinking around it, saying, hey, this is awesome. You should try me. If you get pleasure from me,

you should do it again. And in this way, you could think of a drug as being a sort of like heroine, being super normal stimuli, that sense of contentment and pleasure that you would get. Um, your body doesn't know whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing. It just knows the feeling. So most drugs activate this pleasure circuitry. This uh, this dopamine circuitry that we're talking about here. So we're talking alcohol, we're talking nicotine, heroin, cocaine,

uh amphetamines, cannabis. The only things that really don't make this list are halluciniens, LSD and mescaline. And as a side note, food can be an addiction to. But well, we can talk about that pretty like any human behavior. So let's say that you have, you know, a glass of wine. There's that reward that occurs in the brain.

You get a flood of dopamine or I shouldn't say a flood because it's not an actual flood, but you get a significant amount or increase in the brain that feels like a flood, and that strengthens the neural pathways the memory of the behavior, making it far easier to recall the pleasure and then engage in that behavior again and again. Yeah, this is interesting. One of the presenters

at the World Science Festival mentioned nine eleven. The whole idea, you know, everyone knows or thinks thinks that thinks they know exactly what they were doing when nine eleven occurred, like that strong memory, that that sort of pillar standing up standing out from the landscape of our existing memories. And drug memories are like that, nor a de alcohol.

What's the presenter by the way. Um, But on one hand, this this this sounds completely obvious, right, because when when one is engaging in some some kind of drug, be it a cup of coffee, a cigarette, wine, heroine, etcetera, we're dealing with a heightened level level of pleasure and therefore, conceivably that is a more memorable moment. Right. You're feeling really good at that moment, and therefore your brain is encoding that memory and all the very stimuli around it.

So it's not just I had a cigarette and a cigarette was uh enjoyable and was pleasurable. But I had a cigarette at a bar. I had a cigarette among this group of people, this song was playing. All this stuff sort of gets encoded into the memory. Yeah, And that's the thing that makes us really complicated in the sense because it's very hard to chease out the behavior from the genetics, from the memory, from the environment. It's almost like all of these have a bit of play

into addiction. And according to the National Institute of Health, you can see that with brain imaging technology that addiction is disrupting specific brain circuits affected by addiction. And they say that this these changes go beyond the brain's rewards stem to include regions involved in memory learning, impulse control,

and we'll talk more about that later. Stress reactivity and repeated drugg exposure resets these circuits toward compulsive behavior, so that a person's control over the desire to seek and use drugs is compromised, despite whatever consequences arise. So I thought that was interesting. Again, it's not just the behavior, it's that it's creating these kind of neural pathways, these

sort of ghosts in the machine of your brain. So even if you abstain from from drugs or that thing, you may still have triggers that would activate those pathways. All right, we're back. We're discussing addiction, the science of addiction. We've just finished talking about addiction. UM, what it is, how it works, What are some of the basics, uh in terms of our understanding of of of addiction from a disease model standpoint. And UH, this leads to the

inevitable question who becomes addicted? Because we we've seen this, We see this all the time in the world around this. It's not an equal playing field. Addiction is not an equally equal opportunity offender. Uh, some people have more of a problem with it than others. And how do we figure that out? Like what's going on there? We can't just say it's you know, God shooting lightning bolts of addiction down at people and making uh, you know, packets of drugs land in front of some and not others.

I mean they're uh, just as addiction itself is a is more complex than that. Uh, who becomes an addict is also a fairly complex situation. Yeah, And of course the older model would be, oh, it's the person who has no will power, It's the person who just doesn't have any integrity. And we know this is not true. We know that addiction is not any one sort of

magic bullet um that arrives in a person's chest. You could have a genetic disposition which would cause you to have a blunted reaction to dopamine, and that would require more and more of the substance to produce the same sense of pleasure in someone else. So in other words, for me, um, I genetically have stuff um that has to do with addiction in my family. So it maybe maybe that I need uh six beers to your two beers to have that same level of dopamine activity in

the brain in that sense of pleasure. So that's one way that that a person might be become addicted because they have circumstances in place. And then of course we have um, you know the environment, um, how much stress is in that environment, and we also have the way that the brain develops. So genetics, let's talk about this

real quick. Studies of identical twins indicate that as much as half of an individual's risk of becoming addicted to nicotine, alcohol, or other drugs depends on his or her genes and twin studies on addiction don't reveal the full reaction range of genotype, right, but they do indicate that under a particular and really relevant societal scenarios, genetype plays a substantial role in your vulnerability. Is pretty impressive because that is that is higher than some cancers in terms of how

much genetics is playing a role. Now, it's also not as simple as saying, oh, well, here's the gene for addiction, can we zapp that. No, it's it's more complicated than that.

We are we're not at the point yet where we can just say we can look at somebody and do some sort of funny little scan or blood test and say, oh, well, this person is prone to addiction, although one day we may be able to but of course that it's just it's a hard thing to answer right now because UM, you know, if you if you were to scan a child and say you would appear that you may become addicted to something or you may have addictive behavior, part

of that environment is going to factor into that. UM. So again it's just not that UM, you know, cut and dried. So David Lyndon the neuroscience, as an author of the Compass of Pleasure UM, has some really good information outfare about variants and genes that turned down the function of dopamine signaling in the brain. If anybody wants

to read more about that. UM, but we should probably talk about environment and its stressors triggering self medicating behavior because David Lyndon says that stress hormones are secreted by your adrenal glands and that sits on top of your kidneys, and they pass into your brain and they bind stress 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 where we associate feeling stressful with the release of having that cigarette, that ice cream more of course, been in Jerry's cigarette ice cream. Yeah, and we can. We'll talk

a little bit more about habits later on. But then you also have other conditions like you might have PTSD, you might have depression or a d h D, and those underlying factors could certainly ramp up this feeling of stress, anxiety or depression. Um add to this, you have teenagers who are beginning to take on some of these substances,

and their brains are pretty malleable. We know this. We know that the preventable cortex, for instance, the seat of judgment, doesn't even really complete itself until the age of in some cases much older. So we know already that teenagers are at risk in the sense that they don't have the sort of executive functions that might stop them from engaging in risky, risky behavior. But moreover, there's some evidence that, say, dabbling with nicotine with cigarettes could actually prepare their brains

to become more receptive to other substances. Yeah, this is really interesting research because it deals impart with that idea of of something as a gateway substance, as a gateway drug, which is a term that has really lost a lot of value, I feel, thanks to its overuse in drug war campaigning, because because you know, we we all heard this growing up. You know, this substance, this experience is

a gateway to other experiences. It's like you know, stepping your your foot into the water and then that undertow is gonna grab you and just drag you down through worse and or drug experiences into some sort of ultimate doom. And of course people's realities tend to be uh you know, they say, oh, well, you know, don't smoke cigarettes. It's a it's a it's a gateway drug. And then what when one eventually tries a cigarette and they realize, hey, my life didn't just end. You know, I don't feel

the world collapsing around me. I don't feel that undertow dragging me down. Therefore this can't be that bad, and those they must have been just completely full of it and trying to scare me with scare tactics into not trying these things. So it's you know, reasons like that that you end up throwing the idea of a gateway

drug out out the window. But the science behind this, UH really argues in the favor of of cigarettes, particularly serving as I almost don't want to stay gateway drive because again that the term is so uh so bad. But but but what is occurring here is that the nicotine is essentially opening up the pathways, loosening the pathway

for addictive behavior with other substances. Yeah, according to UH neurobiologists a Mere Levine, and he was on the panel of cocaine users smoked first in their teenage years, which is astounding. So he thought, well, is this is just you know, cause correlation here is there's something actually to this, And so he and his colleagues began to look to see if there are any long lasting changes in nicotine use um in the formative years in the teenage years,

so whether they do. They applied mice with nicotine, followed seven days later by cook cane and compared with mace on cocaine who had not previously received nicotine, the animals were percent more active and seventy eight percent more likely to return to areas previously associated with the cocaine. Yeah, and the reverse did not hold true, that cocaine had no effect on nicotine induced behavior in the mice stepped

in the study. Right. So, um, this all has to do with something called the fosph B gene, which is related to addiction. And what we see is sort of a this is sort of Layman's terms. Are I'm gonna get too deep into it. Um, Probably the best way to say this is that there's a sort of a greater expression of that gene, of that fosp by gene. If as you say that, the pathways have been loosened by nicotine. So when cocaine comes along, Hey, look at this, we we sort of know the drill. Here's what we're

talking about. Yeah. Yeah, it loosens up the DNA packaging system. That's that's involved here, and it's in it and it allows greater express action of that fospe gene. Now, the added problem here is um, as we've talked about before, the amygdala in teenagers has a heightened sense of fear and a heightened sense of stress when you're a teenager. And the magdala is so interesting to me because it

processes both physical pain and emotional pain. So if you're a teenager and you're brooding, you really may feel like life is terrible, life is ending, you're being hurt. Yeah, we did that whole episode on the what I was a teenage teenager? I think, yeah, I was a teenage teenager, and so it was I think we had mentioned then, So as an adult, do you hear a teenager talking about this and you feel like they're just being histrionic when in fact they are actually feeling that level of

pain and discomfort. Yeah, and there I think we discussed

in that that episode. And one of the things about the teenager's brain is that from a you know, an evolutionary standpoint, the teenager is primed to leave his or her community and find a new community in which to thrive, which means that there's an increased dependence on social pressures, on fitting in with a social group, because that, in an evolutionary sense, means survival and you know, to add more fuel to the fire if you happen to be

that person who's whose genes dictate an amygdala in the first place, that's more reactive to stress. Then you are going to feel things a little bit stronger than your average bear, both as a teenager, teenager and an adult. So that makes dealing with environmental factors UH emotions a

lot harder. And you can see how people begin to turn to things to comfort themselves, right, whether it be food or smoking, or drugs or some other leave sex addiction, UM, there are so many different ways to to actually try to stoke those UM. I guess you can call them

members of pleasure and content. Now, an important thing to keep in mind about about addiction is that it actually changes the brain UH in many ways, physically changes the brain of the addict UH and uh and and so we're gonna run through some of the changes that are happening here. Yeah, we mentioned that there is a loss of dopamine receptors in the brains of addicts as D two receptors, So again you would see that it takes more dopamine to get that same sort of level in

your brain of pleasure. And we I think we mentioned that more in genetics. But when you're taking a substance UM repeatedly, of course you're going to have some changes in your dopamine receptors. And what's interesting here too, is that it's not not just the dopamine receptors as affected by the drug, because that's kind of an obvious, almost

a cliche that we understand with with drug addiction. Oh well, now you have to use more to try and chase that original high, or you're having to drink more to to to to to reach the same level that you're reaching previously. But it also bleeds over to other areas of the dopamine experience, and two things such as love I appreciate and a food various you know, and other other things in life that would give you the same

dopamine effect, you feel less of it. So an addict ends up feeling their connection to the rest of the world dampened or even deadened. Uh and UH. And the easiest way to feel normal again in regards to those connections is to turn back to that drug that's warped the dopamine uh cycle to begin with. Yeah, it's terrible, right because at first you you're just chasing pleasure, and then UH that the effects of that substance have taken such a toll that you're just trying to chase a

sort of equilibrium. Yeah, that's an important thing to keep in mind. And and also, um, something that they hit on in the presentation of World Science Festival is that there's it's easy to fall into this outsider mode of thinking that, oh, a addic just likes to feel good and that's why they keep taking the substance in order to feel good and to get high and to escape. Whereas that, to your point, it eventually becomes not about

feeling good and about recreation. It's about treating self medicating their own illness. Really well, anybody who has experienced the hair of the dog the next day, right, you know, let's well, think you have a hangover hair in your mouth. Yeah, you have a hangover and you've got a bunch of dog hair clown knows on and uh, you don't know what happened. No, actually you wake up and you say, I'll just have a beer to sort of reset myself.

I've always wondered if that works. I always read about it, and you know, they're always doing that in various noir stories and all but work. I feel like we went in we went over this in the Hangover episode we did ages ago, but I don't recall. I don't know, it's been so long since I engaged in that I feel like I probably did it. And then, you know, probably later that night, had more of whatever like wine, and then felt terrible again, and then woke up again

and again. You see how this all plays out. What I thought was interesting about the panel at the World Science Festival is that they showed the brains of a methodic heroin addict and um an obese person, and what they saw, again is all less D two receptors in the brain. And they said, look this this is also true for obesity, which is essentially food addiction. And if you look in terms of obesity cases of severe obesity our food addiction, with only ten of the cases of

severe severe obesity having to do with a metabolic defect. Again, some of this bleeds over to this other area. When we talk about obesity, we tend to judge the person in the willpower right or the lack of willpower, when what we're seeing here is the habit becoming so ingrained. Another way the brain changes, addiction results in more synaps connections. This is the idea that the pathways to the habit forms more connections. Uh, and then more the more the

substances abused. And this is an area that research are still trying to to fully understand what's going on here. But but my understanding, based on the research materials we're looking at, is that that this is thought to tie in tow again those drug memories. There are formed the idea that when one is taking the substance, you're encoding all these memories about the use of the substance, the environment which the substance is used, and and then that's

playing into these various synaps connections. Yeah. They had a great image of that and you could see where the little synaptic connections were created and um, and it did kind of give you this idea like, here's all this stuff that's being created so that you can have a sticky, sticky memory of the path to get back to the behavior or the addiction. Yeah, sticky memory in a sense. It's like a sticky placed right on the brains thing. Yea, hey,

this is this is the way to feel good right here. Well, it's kind of and it was sort of a terrifying image too, because I sort of showed that the normal snapped the connection there and then this other sort of thing that shows up and it had sound effects to remember it kind of went right, did have some sort of alien like brain alien Yeah. Um. The other thing that has affected is your hippocampus that's sort of rewired in the brains of alcoholics. And we talk about hipocampus,

we're talking more about memory here. So it would make sense that if you're an alcoholic, um, a lot of your memories are going to be stored in the same way or even committed long term in the same way. And what has been found is that heavy drinking can reduce total hippocampus volume, and that was reported in the November two thousand and six issue of Alcoholism Clinical and

Experimental Research. I've seen other papers on this too that will say, now the person's memory while it can suffer that the brain sort of shuttles um the hippocampus or rather some of the functions of the hippocampus to other parts of the branding to try to make up for that. Um. But what we're talking about here is an imperfect memory, right. Also, it has an effect on willpower, you know, with the

with decreased willpower. Yeah, so that's kind of you know, adding links insult to injury here, right, because you know, you engage in the behavior and if it becomes rutinized enough than all of a sudden, that part of your brain that deals with executive function, well, you don't have nearly as much neural activity there because of the behavior. So even if you wanted to quit, it makes it that much harder. Another way that that that we're actually

seeing the brain change here with addiction. UH two thousand twelve, research from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, using mice in a in a research project, found that heavy alcohol use actually a rewires brain circuity, making it get harder for alcoholics to recover psychologically following a traumatic experience, which again feels like another kick in the gut to this overall situation because suddenly decreased the willpower and you're

gonna have harder time bouncing back from from traumatic events. And therefore, what comfort blanket you run to, You go to the the substance that is the gateway to feeling normal again. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit more specifically about relapse on the next episode. UM but when we talk out more abou the future of addiction. UM but, yeah, I mean that when do people tend to relapse, Not when things are going well, it's when something terrible, stressful

is happening in their lives. And um again, you've got those ghosts of the neural furcuatory just sitting there waiting to be activated. Yeah. I think when we were discussing habits in one of our habit episodes for around the year's time, I think we talked about when that when the brain forms a new habit, it's like it's like

a road. Okay, you have a two lane highway going from point A to point B. When you want to build a new road, you have to build next to that existing road, you know, or even off of that existing road. So maybe you have the new four lane highway over here, but that two lane highway is still there. The brain still knows where it is, and if it has to, or if it thinks it has to, it

will take that road. That's right. So if that road is that you take a drink at six pm, and that's when all of this would begin these triggers, then you just take the other road. Maybe you go and work out at six pm. You have to take something else to place the behavior in order to really sort of um mess with the ghosts of the neural circuitry um.

In fact, when we talk about habit um, there are a couple of authors and researchers and m Grabel and Kyle S. Smith writing for Scientific American, and they say that we learn in chunks, kind of like if you're committing the digits of pie to your your memory, you would probably do them in chunks, like say seven digits, right,

And they're saying the same thing happens with habits. And this happens when the prefrontal cortex communicates with a stri itum and the stri item communicates with the mid brain where dopamine helps with learning and assigning values to values to goals. And they say that these circuits create feedback loops which help us to figure out what's working and

not working in behavior. And as we were even and that's that's sort of the point where you can be like, I don't know about this behavior, right, Like you're maybe you're executive functions are sort of still intact. But let's say you keep repeating the behavior over and over again, Well, that feedback loops become stronger, stamping routines into these single units or chunks. Yeah, the chunking process, which I think when we've touched on on this before, the analogy I

always go to is is like hot keys. You know, instead of instead of going through you know, go to the drag down menu and in a program and then go to another sub menu to pull up this cool that use all the time, you just start using the hot key, and then the hot key becomes such a habit you forget how to find it elsewhere. You may even forget what the hot key is. You just have

the muscle memory of hitting it. And this you see the same thing in various programming right, and where the program is in X than y and z. So that's what your brain is doing. It's taking the shortcuts. It's a it's an economic way of doing the same task over and over again. Well, here's the crazy thing that these researchers saw is that and they saw this in

rats too. By the way they saw they did a ton of research on this um They saw that chunking, that imprinting getting stronger and stronger with the feedback loops and a aventually another system called the infro limbic system. Well, it says, I'll help you out here, strike item, and I'll help you chunk some more of these and imprint

this stuff. And so what happens is that the infrolymbics cortex begins to work in concert with dopamine and begins to really control when we should dabble in this activity. And it's almost like that infrolymbics system becomes it's sort of like this outside part of the brain going, well, okay, strike item. If you're gonna keep doing this and your loops are gonna get you know, uh more and more well trenched, then I'll go ahead and let this behavior.

And as we talked about with Charles Doohig and his book about habits, at some point habits become so ingrained that your prefrontal cortex is just like, you know what, I don't need to do this. I know this, this person's this is that person's habit, and I don't I just need to give radio silent here because the rest of the brain knows what to do now and pick

up all right. So I know what everyone's wondering at this point is all this damage we've we've we've talked about the changes that occurring to the brain of the damage is it reversible? Can you actually turn back the clock on this and and sort of reclaim the brain kind of depends on ageing genetics according to the panel

from the World Science Festival, and the level of neural plasticities. So, hey, if you're younger and you catch this, well, obviously the damage to your brain can be UM, then you can kind of go back in the time machine and work things back out. And you're often earlier in the overall timeline of addiction to so you have that working in

your advantage. So basically, the earlier you catch it, the earlier you're able to actually get in there and not not not as much as even turn back the clock as much as just try to prevent um going further down the road the better if you're going to be If you are further down the road, Um, you've got those molecular and cellular scars that remain on the brain. Um, you could actually maybe have a little injection of synthetic human growth hormone. And researchers from Upselling University and so

we didn't have been doing this. They have been looking at brain cells targeted for early death by continued opiate use, and they're seeing that that some of those cells can be salvaged by this um human growth HORMONELL so, but you know who knows sort of what the side effects are that and that's yeah, certainly down the road. Don't head your bets on that and say, oh, I'll just get an injection at my brain and that will fix everything once I've I've actually put put the halt on

the drug use. Yeah, if you've listened to our earlier episodes. Uh, don't be on yourself if you've been stung by jellyfish, don't self trepionate, and don't inject yourself with h H. All right, So there you have it. Uh, there is ah, just you know, intro into the science of addiction. What's happening in the brain, what kind of changes are occurring and uh, and what can be done ultimately to reverse some of this damage and put a stamp on it. Yeah.

And David Lyndon said something very interesting to Terry Gross when he was on her show and he was talking about his book The Compass of Pleasure. He said, when you understand the biology of the pleasure circuit and when you understand how the contribution of genetics and stress and life experience. Actually, even starting in the womb and going forward all come together. The end result is that you have to realize that any one of us, any one of us, could be an addict at any time. Addiction

is not fundamentally a moral failing. It's not a disease of weak willed losers. When you look at the biology. The only model of addiction that makes sense as a disease based model, and the only attitude towards addicts that makes sense is one of compassion. So they have it the science of addiction. And hey, the next episode is going to explore the future of addiction, so I hope you will stay tuned UH to listen to that episode

as well. In the meantime, you can explore this and countless other topics that stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's our mothership. That's where you'll find all the videos on the podcast, blog posts, the links out to our social media accounts like our Facebook, our Twitter, and our tumbler.

And hey, if you want to shoot us an email, if you have thoughts about addiction, UH, your own dealings with it, your own dealings with the science of it, you can send us an email at Blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com