ETA: I wrote this while having a…caffeine episode…early this morning. The sarcastic tone is directed to some interesting commentary I received from a Very Special forum I won’t name. I only realized, when reading it later, that it sounds like it was written by a pissy 7th grader. Plus, I’m not sure if it makes any sense whatsoever to anyone who is not me. A longer, much politer version is in the works.
Let’s take an example from a study I recently read:
Food activates the brain’s dopaminergic pathways.
Dopaminergic pathways are also activated by dangeorus, addictive drugs.
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∴ FOOD IS DANGEROUS AND ADDICTIVE!!!!!!!!!!
This kind of logic is analogous to saying the following:
Oxygen binds to hemoglobin in the blood.
Hemoglobin also binds to lethal, toxic carbon monoxide.
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∴ OXYGEN IS LETHALLY TOXIC!!!!!!
Um, no.
Oxygen is supposed to bind to hemoglobin. That is why hemoglobin is there in the first place — to carry oxygen. And you see, food is what’s called a natural reward. It is supposed to activate pleasurable, rewarding biochemical pathways. That is why those pathways exist in the first place — to reward us for doing things necessary to survival. Like eating food.
There is a whole set of survival-enhancing behaviours that act as natural rewards. Anything that displaces those natural rewards that is not necessary to life, or in fact, interferes with life, is potentially dangerous and addictive.
That’s not saying that one survival behaviour, if used to excess, can’t interfere with the other survival behaviours and throw the whole thing out of balance — it can. Certainly. But that is not an addiction. That is something else, a disorder or disease that has its provenance not in the substance itself — or we’d all be fucked up, imbalanced twits who go on SLEEPING BENDERS or EATING BINGES or SALT FRENZIES every second week — but in an underlying issue in the organism.
And guess what? I can hypothesize about this shit as much as I like, because that’s what scientists in the field are arguing about right now — there is really no official definition for what constitutes addiction yet (they didn’t even use the term addiction in DSM-IV, apparently, because it was so fraught with controversy.)
Also? According to some history, the concept of “addiction” itself has its origins in Calvinist moral doctrines. So my hunch that labelling a substance as an “addiction” carries with it a moral value judgment is very likely spot-on.
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Sounds fine to me!
People say I makin’ shit up.
Dat make me mad.
I write ANGRY BLOG!!!!!!!!!
Makes complete sense to me, too. Just one comment: clearly addictive substances (i.e, not food) are not always equally addictive to all people either. Alcohol is a good example – not everyone has the same chances of becoming addicted to it.
Also, I think you would have loved the prof who taught my social neuroscience course – one of the things he got very upset about was the (unfounded) assumption that two processes must be the same if they use the same neuronal pathways. (He was also great at prying apart correlation and causation – particularly brain imaging studies usually have a correlational aspect to them since brain activity is usually not manipulated directly – except if you use transcranial manipulation and that’s not a brain imaging technique). Also, it’s always a good idea to keep in mind that while neuroscience uses some really cool methods, knowledge of the brain is still very limited and while fMRI in particular can do quite amazing things its spacial resolution is far from perfect – something that makes results of studies using fMRI even harder to interpret.
clearly addictive substances (i.e, not food) are not always equally addictive to all people either. Alcohol is a good example – not everyone has the same chances of becoming addicted to it.
Very true. People have different susceptibilities, even to substances that are, objectively, addictive.
knowledge of the brain is still very limited
Also true. It will be interesting to see all the cool things we discover in the next 50 or so years.