Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

by Maia Szalavitz

Both lessened repetition of the habit itself and fewer cues for smoking make addiction less likely...

Although the traditional disease model suggests that people in the grip of addiction have no free will, this has never fit the facts. As noted earlier, addicted people don’t get high in front of the police; they plan specifically to ensure their supply and to avoid being detected.

On the other hand, addicts certainly also behave compulsively and apparently irrationally.

Seeing addiction as a learning disorder accounts for this paradox far better than either a disease model of complete slavery to drugs or a moral model of completely free choice.

If what changes in the brain during addiction are the areas that set priorities, this will skew the ability to choose w...

Learning does not require abstinence, and it may be necessary for people to develop alternative coping skills before recovery is possible.

Although people can certainly learn during addiction, the condition itself is defined by persistence in the face of punishment.

Consequently, it is unrealistic to expect that arrest, incarceration, and other coercive approaches will effectively treat it—and, as described earlier, that is what the data overwhelmingly show.

People with addiction are human; their learning disorder is limited to compulsive behavior around drugs that resists punishment.

Since people always have wanted and probably always will want ways to alter their moods, drug use will likely always be with us. We can either accept this and try to reduce associated damage—or aim for the unrealistic ideal of a drug-free world, regardless of the damage done while seeking it.

It’s cheaper and easier to regulate a market and control factors like price, places where use is permitted, times when it is acceptable, and purity than it is to try to legislate and enforce it out of existence.

Our genes don’t contain nearly enough information to direct the placement of every neuron, every glial cell, and every synapse. Many of the first, primitive connections are random, and many useless.

Ruthless pruning takes place during development, killing millions of cells that don’t manage to hook up properly or aren’t in networks that represent learning. In the brain, it’s absolutely literally true that if you don’t use particular cells and synapses, you lose them.

there is some intriguing evidence that people in long-term recovery do build up extra gray matter in the prefrontal cortex regions responsible for self-monitoring and self-control.