Addiction in the Brain
Addiction is often read as a failure of willpower. The neuroscience tells a different story— one about a survival circuit hijacked, and rewired.
By Neuroscience Club
Edited by Arina Evtushenko
Cognitive neuroscience is the branch of neuroscience that studies the biological processes underlying human cognition— especially the relationship between brain structures, brain activity and cognitive function. Addiction sits squarely in its territory, because it is, at root, a change in the brain.
A drug craving is a dynamic, neurocognitive, emotional – motivational response to a wide range of cues, from internal states to external surroundings, and from drug-related triggers to stressful events. For someone with an addiction, craving can feel like an appetite— a hunger. Addiction develops when the brain’ s pleasure circuits become overwhelmed. Drugs interfere with how neurons send, receive and process signals: some activate neurons because their chemical structure mimics a natural neurotransmitter, while others cause neurons to release unusually large amounts of one.
The process of addiction
There is a common belief that addiction is a failure or a moral wrongdoing— that someone struggling with drugs simply made bad choices. In reality it is far more complex. A whole mechanism unfolds in the brain to turn use into dependence( and not only on drugs, but on sweets, smoking and more). For this reason, more of us now think of addiction as a brain disease, or chronic illness— a condition that lasts a year or longer and usually cannot be cured, only managed. With the right treatment, addiction can sometimes be managed, but doing so can be as hard as overcoming any other serious disease.
Our brains contain a reward system that exists to help us survive: when we eat, we are rewarded, because eating keeps us alive. The reward arrives as pleasure hormones such as dopamine or serotonin, which make us want to repeat the action. But when something artificial— a drug—
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