Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction

by Judith Grisel

because the brain’s capacity to learn and adapt is basically infinite. What was once a normal state punctuated by periods of high, inexorably transforms to a state of desperation that is only temporarily subdued by drug.

“Alcohol makes you feel like you’re supposed to feel when you’re not drinking alcohol.”

But if there is a devil, it lives inside each of us. One of my greatest assets is knowing that my primary enemy is not outside me, and for this I am grateful to all my experiences. We all have the capacity for wrong; otherwise we could not, in fact, be free.

The opposite of addiction, I have learned, is not sobriety but choice.

cells are continuously occupied with two principal tasks: responding to the environment and then adapting to it.

it’s not as though any of us accurately experiences what is around us.

The most important lesson here, though, is that our senses constrain our experience by offering us a relatively thin slice of what’s out there—a highly filtered version of our environment.

Dopamine in both pathways naturally declines with age, partly accounting for general decreases in the eagerness to explore new things and the ability to quickly move toward them.

The brain’s response to a drug is always to facilitate the opposite state; therefore, the only way for any regular user to feel normal is to take the drug.

“How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it…he who pursues either of them is generally compelled to take the other. They are two, and yet they grow together out of one head or stem.”

Specifically, the opponent-process theory posits that any stimulus that alters brain functioning to affect the way we feel will elicit a response by the brain that is exactly opposite to the effect of the stimulus. As Newton might succinctly put it: who goes up, must come down.

But with repeated exposure (and no drug delivery), such responses indicative of the b process begin to dissipate and eventually disappear. So, it is possible to extinguish a craving over time, as the brain adapts again, but this time to the non-predictive value of the cues.

Retrain the brain how to react to something

For instance, does regular use lead to spending long hours on the couch watching cartoons, or does it just so happen that people who like to sit around watching television (or poring through shells at the beach) also enjoy marijuana?

In fact, downregulation had reversed with my abstinence. As my receptors returned, so did my appreciation for everyday beauty.

Instead, the misery imposed by an adapted brain makes quitting seem worse than dying.

It seems no coincidence that the popularity of this drug rose with more fragmentation and disconnection in present-day society. We hardly know our neighbors and, at least in the United States, spend much of our day isolated from our communities, including the natural world, as we drive around in metal boxes and spend our days and nights interacting with machines. This is painful and unnatural, but is the antidote a drug that temporarily lifts the veil to show us ourselves in each other, and then strengthens the walls between?

“It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation….I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.”3

On the other hand, even bad trips are often perceived positively in retrospect, as a way for the user to face challenging concepts, such as the eventuality of his own mortality, or to make other difficult existential realizations.

The drive to alter experience is universal. We have been intentionally administering substances in order to alter psychological functioning as far back as we have written records (and likely before). For every advance in our understanding of how the brain works, we discover that there exists a natural product to exploit it.

The general consensus has been that cannabinoids don’t cause the disorder but can unmask a latent vulnerability, bringing schizophrenic symptoms to the surface that might otherwise have remained below the threshold for detection.

Predictably, in the age of the brain, the pendulum has swung far to the opposite pole: morality, character, and personal responsibility are moot; addicts are victims of an abnormal biology, and “choice” may itself be an illusion. The good news, we are told, is that medicine will soon find a cure.

All genetic influence, we’ve learned, is context dependent and incredibly complex.

The heart of the matter is that the brain adapts to any drug that alters its activity and it appears to do this permanently when exposure occurs during development. The more exposure to the substance we have, and the earlier we have it, the more strongly the brain adjusts.

So, while I can elaborate on science’s lack of a definitive explanation almost indefinitely, the bottom line is that there are likely as many pathways to becoming an addict as there are addicts.

“better understanding of the brain is certain to lead man to a richer comprehension both of himself, of his fellow man, and of society, and in fact of the whole world with its problems.”

The bitter fact is that almost without exception one’s chance of cure from any chronic brain-related disorder is more or less the same as it has always been.

This was a very good thing for the field, not only because it more accurately reflects reality, but also because a stance of openness and questioning is a catalyst to more discovery. No one is going to learn what they don’t want to know.

Removing the drive to get high, as ancient, ubiquitous, and neurologically relevant as it is, is about as likely to happen as removing our desire to create and explore.

This is why I’m not against drugs or drug use, but am so thoroughly opposed to addiction: it strips us of our precious freedom.

They are all exquisitely tuned to appreciate and learn from our experiences with each other and the natural world, through connections, communication, our senses, poetry, music, and dance, the world of ideas, and the limits of those ideas.