Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction | Judy Grisel | TEDxPSU

By the time they graduate from high school, 70% of children will have drunk alcohol, half will have tried an illegal drug and almost that many will have smoked or vaped nicotine, one in five will have used unauthorized prescriptions, these figures are fundamental because One of the main factors in the development of substance use disorders is early exposure. It is a fact that most people who have a substance use disorder started using before the age of 18, for example, if you start drinking at age 14, you are seven times more likely to develop a substance use disorder. substances. problem with alcohol, then I would do it if I had waited until I was 21 or older, so why do kids take these risks well?

They are primed for those risks, and in fact, throughout most of our evolutionary history, high risk taking, novelty seeking, and low respect for adults. and the authorities have benefited the population as a whole, it is great to have a group of people who take opposite risks living together with more cautious people so that we have a balance between progress and caution, and these changes are also very good for them individually because they helps to develop. their own identities this tendency to experiment and take risks is built into the way the brain develops there is a gap between the development of reward and motivation pathways that occurs faster than those of caution, impulse control, and abstract reasoning and that serves them again by helping them develop their identities and serves the rest of us.

Around 10,000 people die every day from drug abuse around the world and I should have been one of those. I had my first drink at 13 and launched myself into the races that I spent the next ten years drinking. as many mind-altering chemicals as I could get my hands on and as a result I was expelled from three schools I became homeless I contracted hepatitis C and ended up in treatment right after I turned 23 I thought I was going to finish To be a spa, this was in the '80s, so I had no idea what treatment it was, but I got to a treatment center and they told me that if I wanted to live I was going to have to be abstinent, which I thought was terrible.

It was not. Sure, but I thought there was a way back, if I had a disease that was killing me, I was going to find a cure for the disease and then I could consume it without dying, so I finally got a PhD in

neuroscience

and I've been doing research in the field. since then and I haven't solved it and no one else has either. What we know is that

addiction

is characterized by craving and tolerance for compulsive use, meaning that the drug works less and less well over time and dependence, so that when the drugs wear off, you feel less good about yourself. normal and those things are mediated by about half of them, the risk comes from genetics and genetic factors include things like we've been talking about, so the tendency towards novelty seeking and risk taking is greater in adolescents than in adults, but in some adolescents more than others, environmental factors include things like access and stress, and developmental factors are really important, so adverse

experience

s early in life really They prepare a person to develop an

addiction

, like I used to do to cope, but also just any adolescent exposure really increases the risk, so to talk about what addiction is, I thought I'd give you this model and start with the idea that we have a homeostatic feeling state that is always maintained as a base, so if I ran into you on the street later and you said how are you and you said I'm fine, that would be your homeostasis.

Yours may be different than mine, but we all have one. This is actively maintained by the nervous system and is necessary for us to know if something is good or bad. It happens, for example, if it's your birthday and you have a great day, you'll feel better and that's how you know something wonderful has happened. I don't know if you've noticed, but the day after your birthday is usually a bit of a let down, you don't go straight back to your average baseline, that great day you had takes a toll and then you go back to your baseline.

The same can happen if an adverse

experience

occurs that makes you feel worried or threatened. If that threat is gone, then you feel relaxed and especially cooled before returning back to baseline, so we basically start with this state of maintained lis homeostatic feeling that we move in as good and bad things happen and so on. It's how we know if there are good things and bad things. This happens well, some of us learn that alcohol and other drugs can cause changes in that mood to make us feel better than our maintained homeostatic baseline, but you will probably notice that even a drink or two comes at a small cost.

You don't feel quite normal or you're a little hungover or you're not sleeping as well and then you're back to your baseline, but we don't have to stop with a drink or two, right? So you could have more than one drink or maybe. throw in some weed and that would be better so we can control the delivery of this stuff. You can only have so many birthdays and you can even have more than just the alcohol in weed and be really happy, so it seems cool. except it's not from the brain's perspective and the brain will adapt to cause tolerance so that you're not as happy and even eventually

enough

tolerance so that you actually feel basically normal on your drugs, that adaptation is to maintain the baseline and that too What happens when you stop drugs is when you really notice it, so if you're normal on drugs now, when the drugs wear off, you're at the opposite extreme, so I thought we could take an example when That was a little close to my heart, I liked all the drugs I could find, but I especially liked smoking marijuana and this is popular nowadays, about 40% of kids smoke, that hasn't changed much in recent years , but what has changed is that they smoke more.

Many more smoke daily or frequently and I thought I would describe how marijuana works in the brain and how homeostasis is maintained for marijuana to work. THC is the active ingredient that produces the effect and activates this endocannabinoid system that we have naturally in my life. For the arachidonic juicer, all or 2ag are neurotransmitters that interact with all the black spots that you're seeing throughout the brain, throughout the cortex and in the areas associated with learning and memory associated with motivation associated with reward, and when those chemicals interact, they have an effect. Obviously our brain wouldn't produce this for no reason.

I thought I would explain the effect by telling a story about my dog. My puppy now weighed a hundred pounds, but when he was little one day he was walking through the front yard and my daughter. I dropped a piece of bacon and I could practically see his brain light up. I didn't know he had bacon, he certainly didn't live in grass and I imagine that his olfactory areas and his gustatory sensory cortex, his reward areas may be learning in memory all the time. they were activated with small squirts of an and amide or two AG to let you know Wow bacon, this is amazing, the same thing happens to us.

I don't know what your bacon is, it could be a great line of poetry or music or something. You have a wonderful idea or a good talk, but it will release these chemicals to let you know that something really remarkable or relevant is happening. The reason this system is throughout the brain is because we

never

know exactly what we are going to find. important helps us sort through what is important by highlighting those events or experiences that are particularly significant and this plays an important role in learning in memory and really helps us sort through what we care about and what we don't care about without THC it is a Bit different, isn't it? because it is not synthesized or released.

When we have great experiences, we just smoke it in a bong or a high-powered joint and it goes through the brain and all of that interacts in all those blackheads. In other words, it's all bacon, which is a lot of fun. I think I loved knowing that everything was so much richer and more meaningful and even a tedious day at work could be interesting, of course the brain doesn't like it that way because then you can't really know when something important is happening so it compensates and the way it does it is illustrated in this image of rat brains again on the left your left is a rat that has not consumed THC or is tasty like the analogue and on the right is a completely right brain that had a dose high for about 14 days and I bet my brain when I quit smoking looked a lot like the one on the right and what I felt was that nothing was really interesting. nothing motivated me nothing was really worth spending time with my family yeah you know my aspirations aren't that important anymore in fact the only way to find anything worthwhile was to be completely stoned this happens to people They smoke a lot of marijuana, you can see. in the green, all the areas where these interaction sites are are missing and they are habitual smokers and if this happens during development, when meaning is so important, we are supposed to try new things and discover who we are, then the cortex becomes organize differently than those.

The effects in blue are probably permanent and lead to a different way of processing information. One important thing about the way we process information if we smoke a lot of marijuana is that what we used to find rewarding and pleasurable is no longer as important. So, going back to our model, it's fun to get high with occasional use, but if you do it regularly, your brain will adapt and get rid of those sites of interaction, so now you're not really high and when the weed wears off, There will be a lot of despair. Substance abuse is the leading cause of death among people under 50 years of age and if we take addictive drugs on a regular basis they cause moods exactly opposite to those we wanted to have when I started smoking marijuana.

I loved how you made everything interesting and fun when I quit smoking nothing was interesting and nothing was fun thanks for listening