Eagle-eyed newspaper readers may have noticed what looks like
science journalists playing Mad-Libs in the press room. Every week, there's a new article reporting that scientists have found that something activates the same
neural circuitry as
drugs do. Music, chocolate,
sex, junk food,
romantic love, computer games, exercise, dancing, learning, prayer, and donating to charity have all activate the striatum and orbitofrontal cortex, among other areas. These findings are all backed by legitimate studies performed by respected scientists. But what should we take from these studies? And what does it tell us when our favorite activity looks just like heroin on a brain scan?
Not a lot.
Most of us can go for a jog and not become raving out-of control running fiends, and no one has ever blacked out after a lost weekend on a Nutrageous binge. Common sense should tell us that much, and all the brain scans in the world shouldn't change that. So then what does the latest addiction research add?
Well, neuroscience has figured out that pretty much anything that we enjoy activates a particular set of brain areas called the reward circuit. That circuit goes online when we do these things, and it is not specific to drugs. Sure it's responsive to drugs, but then again, drug-users typically enjoy using drugs. Without doing the studies, I can be pretty sure it's also responsive to skiing, Russian novels, and petting the dog. It's a general reward circuit.
The fascinating thing is that the activation of reward circuitry by, say, music, doesn't mean that music has the ability to usurp our willpower and divert us from our life goals the way heroin or methamphetamines do. For most of us, not matter how much Mahler, Medelssohn, or Merle Haggard we listen to, we saturate and lose interest, and then go seek out other entertainment. Most kinds of activity that activate reward circuitry are self-limiting. Sometimes they are self-limiting when we don't want them to be: I only wish I could get myself addicted to swimming every morning.
When you think about it, the most important scientific question is how drugs differ, neurally, from these not-so-habit-forming substances and activities. Somehow you have special brain mechanisms in place that put the brakes on Little Miss Can't Be Wrong, even if for some of us it takes 100 repetitions. In contrast, cigarettes lead to tolerance, and cocaine can easily take over your life. If we could find out what makes these things different, maybe we could figure out a way to get people bored with drugs. (And yes some people seem to get addicted to M&M's - maybe studying these exceptional cases is a good place to start if we are trying to locate the brain mechanisms of self-limiting pleasure).
So while these kinds of results were new and noteworthy when they were first identified - and most of these have been discovered in the past ten years - they are starting to get unsurprising. Here's to hoping the next round of studies shows why we don't have a national epidemic of square dancing, and maybe figure out how to apply that information to treating drug addiction.
