Understanding Addiction

Since most of us seem to be in vacation mode, myself included, I’m stealing the following passage from Shaun Shelly (with his permission). He in turn took it from Richard Wilmot, author of “American Euphoria: Saying ‘Know’ to Drugs“. The passage compares religious commitments to the commitments made by drug addicts (deals with the devil?). […] (Read the rest.)

By Margôt Tesch…   A note from me (Marc): This self-trust thing….it’s like a hardy weed. It keeps spreading, and now it’s bursting out in all kinds of places. Margôt Tesch, a member of this blog community, trusted her future self to help her curb her drinking. And it worked. This post is her description of […] (Read the rest.)

What I’ve called self-trust in recent posts can be paraphrased as compassion. Compassion for oneself. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been exposed to the Buddhist perspective, which clearly sees compassion for others and compassion for oneself as two sides of the same coin. Compassion, or love, or trust, is considered a kind of natural state […] (Read the rest.)

Here’s a little postscript. Some of you have questioned the liking vs. wanting paradigm, because these states are imputed by the experimenter. Where’s the evidence that the rat is actually feeling liking — or not feeling it, as was the case with the salt-delivery lever? Who’s to say what rats are feeling, anyway? I mean […] (Read the rest.)

I want to start unraveling the talks I heard, beginning with Kent Berridge’s talk. If you haven’t been following this blog or read my book, here’s some background: Berridge has made two major contributions to the study of addiction. The first is the idea that “wanting” and “liking” are independent neural systems. Wanting (or craving, […] (Read the rest.)