The Biology of Desire Quotes

“The trick to overcoming addiction is thus the realignment of desire, so that it switches from the goal of immediate relief to the goal of long-term fulfillment”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“Instead of recovering, it seems that addicts keep growing, as does anyone who overcomes their difficulties through deliberation and insight.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“While re-addiction is clearly a hazard for some, others achieve a realistic and lasting confidence that they’ve outgrown their addictions and it’s time to move on. In fact, survey research published over the last thirty years indicates that most addicts eventually recover permanently.9 For them, the disease label may be an unnecessary, even harmful, burden.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“Donna made it obvious that not only is addiction a developmental journey, but it’s a journey that continues through the period of recovery. In fact, by the time I’d finished my interviews with Donna, the term “recovery” no longer made sense to me. “Recovery” implies going backward, becoming normal again. And it’s a reasonable term if you consider addiction a disease. But many of the addicts I’ve spoken with—including Donna—see themselves as having moved forward, not backward, once they quit, or even while they were quitting. They often find they’ve become far more aware and self-directed than the person they were before their addiction. There’s no easy way to explain this direction of change with the medical terminology of disease and recovery. Instead of recovering, it seems that addicts keep growing, as does anyone who overcomes their difficulties through deliberation and insight.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“Addicts experience something breathtaking when they can stretch their vision of themselves from the immediate present back to the past that shaped them and forward to a future that’s attainable and satisfying.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“The kind of brain changes seen in addiction also show up when people become absorbed in a sport, join a political movement, or become obsessed with their sweetheart or their kids.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“WHY ADDICTION IS NOT A DISEASE In its present-day form, the disease model of addiction asserts that addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease. This disease is evidenced by changes in the brain, especially alterations in the striatum, brought about by the repeated uptake of dopamine in response to drugs and other substances. But it’s also shown by changes in the prefrontal cortex, where regions responsible for cognitive control become partially disconnected from the striatum and sometimes lose a portion of their synapses as the addiction progresses. These are big changes. They can’t be brushed aside. And the disease model is the only coherent model of addiction that actually pays attention to the brain changes reported by hundreds of labs in thousands of scientific articles. It certainly explains the neurobiology of addiction better than the “choice” model and other contenders. It may also have some real clinical utility. It makes sense of the helplessness addicts feel and encourages them to expiate their guilt and shame, by validating their belief that they are unable to get better by themselves. And it seems to account for the incredible persistence of addiction, its proneness to relapse. It even demonstrates why “choice” cannot be the whole answer, because choice is governed by motivation, which is governed by dopamine, and the dopamine system is presumably diseased. Then why should we reject the disease model? The main reason is this: Every experience that is repeated enough times because of its motivational appeal will change the wiring of the striatum (and related regions) while adjusting the flow and uptake of dopamine. Yet we wouldn’t want to call the excitement we feel when visiting Paris, meeting a lover, or cheering for our favourite team a disease. Each rewarding experience builds its own network of synapses in and around the striatum (and OFC), and those networks continue to draw dopamine from its reservoir in the midbrain. That’s true of Paris, romance, football, and heroin. As we anticipate and live through these experiences, each network of synapses is strengthened and refined, so the uptake of dopamine gets more selective as rewards are identified and habits established. Prefrontal control is not usually studied when it comes to travel arrangements and football, but we know from the laboratory and from real life that attractive goals frequently override self-restraint. We know that ego fatigue and now appeal, both natural processes, reduce coordination between prefrontal control systems and the motivational core of the brain (as I’ve called it). So even though addictive habits can be more deeply entrenched than many other habits, there is no clear dividing line between addiction and the repeated pursuit of other attractive goals, either in experience or in brain function. London just doesn’t do it for you anymore. It’s got to be Paris. Good food, sex, music . . . they no longer turn your crank. But cocaine sure does.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“The results are straightforward: the higher the ACE score, the more likely a person was to end up an alcoholic, drug user, food addict, or smoker (among other things). Two graphic examples are shown in Figure 3. These results show that early adverse experience predicts a 500 percent increase in the incidence of adult alcoholism and a 4,600 percent increase in the incidence of IV drug use.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“Addicts are excessively now-oriented, more prone to delay discounting than the population average.1 But nobody knows quite why. Perhaps it’s a personality characteristic they’ve shown since childhood, putting them at greater risk of addiction to begin with.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“Brain change equals synaptic modification, and synaptic modification results from synaptic activity that is boosted by emotion, attention, and repetition.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“Bad habits self-organize like any other habits. Bad habits like addiction grow more deeply and often more quickly than other bad habits, because they result from feedback fuelled by intense desire, and because they crowd out the availability or appeal of alternative pursuits.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“1990s—“the decade of the brain.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“Brains just do what hundreds of millions of years of evolution have determined to be useful, and that includes identifying things that taste good or feel good to us. The brain distinguishes those things from everything else—the background music of the humdrum world—and propels us to go after them.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“I’m convinced that calling addiction a disease is not only inaccurate, it’s often harmful. Harmful, first of all, to addicts themselves. While shame and guilt may be softened by the disease definition, many addicts simply don’t see themselves as ill, and being coerced into an admission that they have a disease can undermine other—sometimes highly valuable—elements of their self-image and self-esteem. Many recovering addicts find it better not to see themselves as helpless victims of a disease, and objective accounts of recovery and relapse suggest they might be right. Treatment experts and addiction counsellors often identify empowerment or self-efficacy as a necessary resource for lasting recovery.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

“neuron”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease