Drugs of abuse, it seems, take advantage of our brain’s remarkable power to learn. Their euphoria produces strong memory associations in the hippocampus: a drug-using buddy, a needle, a phone call to the dope dealer. Heroin dealers seem to understand that forcing addicts to wait for them enhances their customers’ anticipation, spurring their continued patronage. The Velvet Underground sang about this in “I’m Waiting for the Man,” on its first album: “He’s never early, he’s always late. First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait.” (The Velvet Underground’s entire first album, from
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
