Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

by Maia Szalavitz

Addiction is frequently linked with intense drive and obsessiveness, which can fuel all types of success if channeled appropriately—and some believe that the “outsider” perspective of people with illegal drug addictions is linked with creativity.

Properly understood, the addicted brain isn’t broken—it’s simply undergone a different course of development.

When starving, when in love, and when parenting, being able to persist despite negative consequences—the essence of addictive behavior—is not a bug, but a feature, as programmers say.

Desire curdled into dread that only prompted more fruitless and frustrating desire for more.

Like music, language, art, and tool use, the pursuit of altered states of consciousness is a human universal.

That is, addiction is best understood as compulsive use of a substance or compulsive engagement in a behavior despite ongoing negative consequences.

Addiction doesn’t just appear; it unfolds.

Addiction, then, is a coping style that becomes maladaptive when the behavior persists despite ongoing negative consequences.

From the start, I hungered for information, in much the way I’d later crave drugs. Among those who study gifted children, this is called a “rage to learn,” but it can also be a symptom of asynchronous or uneven development and is often found in autism.

Systems in which specific inputs produce predictable outputs would be far more attractive than human beings, with their mystifying and inconsistent demands and their haphazard behavior.

“From the time I was a little girl, I can remember feeling like I didn’t quite belong. I thought I must be an alien from another planet.” (Narcotics Anonymous, Big Book)

The whole range of human character can be found among people with addictions, despite the cruel stereotypes that are typically presented.

Giftedness and high IQ, for instance, are linked with higher rates of illegal drug use than having average intelligence.

Being bold and adventurous and being sad and cautious seem like opposite personality types. However, these two paths to addiction are actually not mutually exclusive.

Here, I had trouble stopping intellectual engagement, not starting it.

It seems that the same regions that gave me my intense curiosity, obsessive focus, and ability to learn and memorize quickly also made me vulnerable to discovering potential bad habits and then rapidly getting locked into them.

the more extreme the addiction, generally, the more extreme the childhood history of trauma.

Epigenetics starkly illustrates that nature and nurture are not separate: they are intimately entangled and interact repeatedly over the course of development.

So, if a child is brought into a wildly stressful, harsh world, genes that will help him thrive in such situations are turned on, while those that would be best in a calmer, safer place are muted.

Preexisting differences in temperament and in negative experiences are what drives the learning of addiction.

I was constantly going on about whatever special interest I had at the time, heedless of anything or anyone else.

Kids who are praised for being, say, smart or athletic or artistic or musical tend to develop a “fixed” view, while those who are rewarded and encouraged for their effort in a particular area learn to see ability and character as something that can grow with experience.

At age 40 to 64, low-ranked clerks were three times more likely to die of any cause compared to those at the top of the heap. The correlations were graded: each step up the ladder lowered risk, each step down raised it.

Stress is only bad if it is overwhelming and makes you feel helpless, which, unfortunately, is exactly what bullying is intended to do.

As the dopamine circuits rewire themselves, the previously reliable pleasures of childhood play start to grow old. What you love becomes boring and loses its flavor.

Openness to learning is also openness to risk, for better or worse. And this means that a brain primed for learning is also a brain primed for addiction.

He claimed that dopamine in the circuitry linked to the nucleus accumbens is the currency of pleasure, the chemical signature of bliss.

Put another way: the pleasures of the hunt are those of lust and sexual longing and the pleasures of the feast are orgasm and afterglow.

Destroying their dopamine cells had taken away their motivation, leaving them with no desire or will to do anything at all, even what was necessary for survival.

using up extra dopamine today by taking drugs will require payback in low mood tomorrow. The bliss of drinking will be followed by the hammering of the hangover.

These different types of pleasure are also important in understanding the role of learning in addiction, because “wanting” is critical to learning while “liking” is less so.

Creating an entirely new network of social support while coping with new academic or employment challenges is hard for everyone—but it’s especially difficult for those who are in some way wired atypically.

No drug takes effect without context;

Moreover, the love of patterns and the ability to take pleasure in detecting and predicting them can lead to success in areas as varied as the arts, medicine, science, programming, and engineering.

Simply by creating an unpredictable pattern of highs and lows, gambling and other behaviors can become addictive—and the fact that this occurs without a drug offers insight into what happens with psychoactive substances and why addiction risk exists at all.

It seems that sometimes, context alone can change a safe dose to a lethal dose.

It’s not hard to imagine why someone might rationally decide to take potentially fatal doses of drugs if they were caged alone with no apparent hope of escape and no alternative pleasures.

People with decent jobs, strong relationships, and good mental health rarely give that all up for intoxicating drugs; instead, drugs are powerful primarily when the rest of your life is broken.

Addiction isn’t just taking drugs. It is a pattern of learned behavior. It only develops when vulnerable people interact with potentially addictive experiences at the wrong time, in the wrong places, and in the wrong pattern for them.

Point by point, the authors illustrated how unhealthy relationships—whether with drugs or with people—share the same fundamental qualities.

As noted earlier, having a highly affectionate and responsive mother turns on different suites of genes, compared to being raised indifferently.

Both chemistry and environment play a role in how you learn to love and who you learn to love.

Moreover, to love, you typically have to persist despite negative consequences—as Shakespeare put it, the course of true love never did run smooth. It is a rare relationship that never requires compromise or perseverance.

A baby, for example, literally needs to be held and cuddled for his stress system to be properly regulated; without repeated, loving care by the same few people, infants are at high risk for lifelong psychiatric and behavioral problems.

Research finds that loneliness can be as dangerous to health as smoking and more harmful than obesity, in fact.

That is, love is real when it expands and enhances your life—and troubling and problematic when it contracts or impairs it.

Trying to help someone you love, even ineffectually, is admirable, not sick.

The role of oxytocin, dopamine, and opioids in wiring future cravings to past memories of our passions means that we learn love and addiction much more permanently than we do things we care less about.

Love and addiction change who we are and what we value—not just what we know.

But the unique property that addiction has as a learning disorder is that, unlike playing music or learning math, addiction changes the values that govern decision making—in favor of getting high.