Memoirs of an Addicted Brain Quotes

“Even when they're not stoned, adolescents live in a world of ideation of their own making and follow trains of thought to extreme conclusions, despite overwhelming evidence that they're just plain wrong”
― Marc Lewis, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs

“In a nutshell, serotonin gives your neurons a thick skin, so they can withstand the pace of the bristling, bustling, neural metropolis. And then along comes a tiny army of LSD molecules, marching out of their Trojan Horse—a small purple tablet—and they look just like serotonin molecules. If you were a receptor site, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Through this insidious trickery, LSD molecules fool the receptors that normally suck up serotonin. They elbow serotonin out of the way and lodge themselves in these receptors instead. They do this in perceptual regions of the cortex, such as the occipital and temporal lobes, in charge of seeing and hearing, and in more cognitive zones, such as the prefrontal cortex, where conscious judgments take place. They do it in brain-stem nuclei that send their messages throughout the brain and body, felt as arousal and alertness. And once they’ve taken up their positions, Troy begins to fall. Not through force, as with the devastating blows of alcohol and dextromethorphan, but through passivity. Once encamped in their serotonin receptors, LSD molecules simply remain passive. They don’t inhibit, they don’t soothe, they don’t regulate, or filter, or modulate. They sit back with evil little grins and say, “It’s showtime! You just go ahead and fire as much as you like. You’re going to pick up a lot of channels you never got before. So have fun. And call me in about eight hours when my shift is over.”
― Marc Lewis, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs

“Cannabinoids relax the rules of cortical crowd control, but 300 micrograms of d-lysergic acid diethylamide break them completely. This is a clean sweep. This is the Renaissance after the Dark Ages. Dopamine—the fuel of desire—is only one of four major neuro modulators. Each of the neuromodulators fuels brain operations in its own particular way. But all four of them share two properties. First, they get released and used up all over the brain, not at specific locales. Second, each is produced by one specialized organ, a brain part designed to manufacture that one potent chemical (see Figure 3). Instead of watering the flowers one by one, neuromodulator release is like a sprinkler system. That’s why neuromodulators initiate changes that are global, not local. Dopamine fuels attraction, focus, approach, and especially wanting and doing. Norepinephrine fuels perceptual alertness, arousal, excitement, and attention to sensory detail. Acetylcholine energizes all mental operations, consciousness, and thought itself. But the final neuromodulator, serotonin, is more complicated in its action. Serotonin does a lot of different things in a lot of different places, because there are many kinds of serotonin receptors, and they inhabit a great variety of neural nooks, staking out an intricate network. One of serotonin’s most important jobs is to regulate information flow throughout the brain by inhibiting the firing of neurons in many places. And it’s the serotonin system that gets dynamited by LSD. Serotonin dampens, it paces, it soothes. It raises the threshold of neurons to the voltage changes induced by glutamate. Remember glutamate? That’s the main excitatory neurotransmitter that carries information from synapse to synapse throughout the brain. Serotonin cools this excitation, putting off the next axonal burst, making the receptive neuron less sensitive to the messages it receives from other neurons. Slow down! Take it easy! Don’t get carried away by every little molecule of glutamate. Serotonin soothes neurons that might otherwise fire too often, too quickly. If you want to know how it feels to get a serotonin boost, ask a depressive several days into antidepressant therapy. Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, and all their cousins leave more serotonin in the synapses, hanging around, waiting to help out when the brain becomes too active. Which is most of the time if you feel the world is dark and threatening. Extra serotonin makes the thinking process more relaxed—a nice change for depressives, who get a chance to wallow in relative normality.”
― Marc Lewis, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs

“The cannabinoid receptor system matures most rapidly, not during childhood, not during adulthood, but during adolescence. So it wouldn’t be surprising if cannabinoid activity is meant to be functional during adolescence, more functional than at any other period of the lifespan. As far as evolution is concerned, adolescents might well benefit from following their own grandiose thoughts, goals, and plans. By doing so, and by ignoring the weight of evidence—or sheer inertia—piled up against them, they would greatly amplify their tendency to explore, to try things, to imbue their plans with more confidence than they deserve. The evolutionary goals of adolescents are to become independent, to make new connections, and to find new territory, new social systems, and most of all new mates. The distortions of adolescent thinking might be precisely poised to facilitate those goals.”
― Marc Lewis, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs

“Remember: synapses used are synapses strengthened; they are the ruts in the garden where rainwater flows, forming deeper and deeper troughs. The congealing and narrowing of synaptic traffic, crisscrossing among the OFC, the amygdala, the VTA, and the ventral striatum, leave less and less choice. There are fewer routes to take with each replay of the fundamental story line. Leading to more repetition, less flexibility; more habit, less choice. The psychological realities of diminished choice and narrowed interests—those well-known attributes of addiction—are precisely paralleled by the neural reality of reduced flexibility in synaptic traffic patterns. But here’s the thing: the brain doesn’t really parallel”
― Marc Lewis, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs

“The bad guys, according to Thomas and his friends, were the “straight people.” Or, if not bad, then certainly misguided. We, on the other hand, were the freaks, the people, brave explorers of the frontiers of the mind.”
― Marc Lewis, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs

“Addictive drugs convert the brain to recognize only one face of God, to thrill to only one suitor.”
― Marc Lewis, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs