Understanding Addiction

A new act to control the prescription of narcotics (we assume they mean opioids) just went into law in Ontario on November 1. (Similar acts are not unlikely in the rest of Canada.) This act will presumably make it harder for people to forge prescriptions, use alternate names, borrow prescriptions, and so forth. One of […] (Read the rest.)

In the last 24 hours, a video clip of a Texas judge beating his teenage daughter (for the crime of downloading music) has gone viral on the internet and news media. It’s a horrendous video, involving not only brutal violence but also vicious humiliation of a child by a parent. What makes the story more […] (Read the rest.)

In a recent reply to a reader’s comment, I waxed eloquent about whether addiction was an impulsive drive or a compulsive drive. Let’s consider the matter more closely. According to neuroscientist Trevor Robbins, impulses can be defined as urges or acts that arise from an input that you can’t inhibit. In other words, the problem […] (Read the rest.)

A reader recently brought up the fascinating connections between Buddhist meditation and neuroscience. There has been a lot of work in the last two decades, trying to develop a scientific foundation for meditation and also teaching science a thing or two, like how meditation changes the brain. In this post I want to suggest how […] (Read the rest.)

In my last post I talked about the debate between the disease model and the choice model of addiction. I argued that you need to understand a bit about the brain in order to make sense of choice in the first place, and I reviewed some of the changes in the brain brought about by […] (Read the rest.)