Addiction is the Perfect Storm

The Brain and Recovery: An Update on the Neuroscience of Addiction:



The last twenty years produced an explosion of understanding about addiction (substance use disorders) and how our brains enable our most human capacities such as assigning value to pleasure and making decisions based upon that value. This lecture summarizes the most current neuroscientific research about addiction -- research that explains how the brain constructs pleasurable experiences, what happens when this process goes wrong and why this can have a dramatic impact on our ability to make proper choices. By Dr. Kevin McCauley

1. Addiction is disorder in the brain's ability to properly perceive pleasure (hedonic dysfunction, it's broken pleasure=reward system)
2. Addiction is a disorder of Choice
3. Addiction is caused by Stress (defect in dopamine system can be caused by all kinds of different stress, especially early stress)
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If you go through the slides and you'll see what happens to the brain of long term binge PMO users. The scary thing is, that one can observe the same changes as with alcohol, nicotine and drug addicts. PMO really was our drug of choice.