Tricking Your Brain into Healthy Addictions | Nora D. Volkow | Big Think

Tricking Your Brain into Healthy Addictions

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Can you force yourself to crave lettuce and running? Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, examines the science of compulsion.

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Nora D. Volkow:

Nora D. Volkow, M.D., became Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health in May 2003. NIDA supports most of the world's research on the health aspects of drug abuse and addiction.

Dr. Volkow's work has been instrumental in demonstrating that drug addiction is a disease of the human brain. As a research psychiatrist and scientist, Dr. Volkow pioneered the use of brain imaging to investigate the toxic effects of drugs and their addictive properties. Her studies have documented changes in the dopamine system affecting the actions of frontal brain regions involved with motivation, drive, and pleasure and the decline of brain dopamine function with age. She has also made important contributions to the neurobiology of obesity, ADHD, and the behavioral changes that occur with aging.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Can drugs change someone’s personality?

Nora Volkow: Yes, indeed. Unfortunately, drugs—again, it depends on the drug, obviously. Not all of the drugs are the same. In terms of how addictive they are, some drugs are more addictive than others. For example, methamphetamine is considered among the most addictive drugs of abuse. Not all of the drugs are the same in terms of their damaging certain circuits of the brain. Some drugs are more harmful. And for example, some interfere with cognitive processes more than others. One of the drugs that has been shown to be particularly damaging for cognitive processes for regulating mood, for example, is ecstasy. On the other hand, you have, for example, like nicotine, that does not damage cognitive processes. So when you are, again, addressing the extent to which a drug is going to produce changes in personality, you have to consider the type of drug.

So nicotine addiction does not, per se, change your personality. On the other hand, if you have drugs like alcohol that will change your personality and will trigger these cyclical shifts in the pattern of a person's behavior that are driven in part by the shifts between intoxication, withdrawal, and recovery. And the same thing happens with opiates. If you maintain someone on, a heroin abuser, when they are taking heroin, their personality may be very expansive. But when the heroin is leaving their body, they can become very irritable and aggressive. So you'll see that.

With repeated use, these drugs can, in some individuals, produce decreasing function of frontal cortex. And frontal cortex is what enables you to really understand a wide variety of environmental stimuli, including social, social communications, which are very, very important. Very important, on a one to one basis, but also in group, in group dynamics. And these can interfere with an ability of a person to properly engage on behaviors and social systems and this could explain why, also a person that has become addicted become more and more and more alienated with their own social networks. Which again, puts them at greater and greater risk of relying more and more on drugs as a means to try to get some sort of reinforcer, because they no longer get even the reinforces that we get with social interaction, which are very powerful.

So yes, indeed, and this is in fact one of the issues that when we are helping someone in a therapeutic set up recover and get back into their social system, recover from drug addiction, we need to very much help them into that transition, so that they regain the knowledge about how to navigate the social systems and they also regain the sensitivity to the social stimuli as enforcers. So that they can also be driven by them.

Question: Can we trick our brains to crave healthy things?

Nora Volkow: I actually am addicted to exercise. I am a compulsive person and again, I think that when one addresses the issue of vulnerabilities, we know that there's an important genetic component into addictions. And so if these genes have survived all these hundreds of years of evolution, an addiction still prevails, does it have, is there something positive about these genetics that make you vulnerable to addiction?

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