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HEALTH/EDUCATION

February 2012

Less Self-Control: Are Addicts' Brains Wired at Birth?

Wired? In both drug abusers and their nonaddicted siblings, some brain areas involved in addiction are larger (red) or smaller (blue), or function less efficiently (yellow), than in healthy, drug-free controls.

Credit: Science/AAAS

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An important factor, and environmental one, I feel is opportunity. Having drugs or alcohol around you, being predisposed to addiction, can be a very bad thing. For example, one sibling has a straight A roommate while the other gets a dead-head for a roommate when they get to college. Which one is more likely to try drugs?

Another huge factor is lifestyle. Kids who are predisposed to addiction need to find drug-free alcohol-free friends and fun activities to keep them busy. Being bored, having low self-esteem, feeling pressured or lonely etc. are things that can lead a youngster to trying drugs and alcohol. I'm not saying that keeping them immersed in sports will guarantee a drug-free youth. I'm saying that kids with sober friends and several hobbies that they enjoy are far less likely to try drugs than kids that do not have them.

Read the article TIME/Siblings Brain Study Sheds Light on the Roots of Addiction

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Never fear. Parents will still convince themselves that their selfish pattern of marriage/divorce/affair(s) etc has no impact on their children yet we are seeing it in obesity, addiction, chronic video gaming etc. Nope. Selfishness and bad decisions rule and screw the kids. They'll adapt because they're kids. Right?

Read the article TIME/Siblings Brain Study Sheds Light on the Roots of Addiction

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I think many are missing the point. It doesn't make someone not responsible for their behavior. Instead it gives that person a tool to understand the difficulty that he or she will have to overcome the addiction. The brain is incredibly complicated but it can be manipulated through very hard work to find new pathways that result in new behaviors. Addicts, like the rest of us, aren't allowed a free ride, but their path to recovery will be more complicated and may take longer as they are learning how to change the way their brain functions.

Read the article NPR/Addicts' Brains May Be Wired At Birth For Less Self-Control

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All the people on these commentaries who cry, "They can't just come up with this conclusion! It could be this, or it could be that. Did they even consider that?", need to calm down and learn about how research is done, and then used.

No professional reads about 1 study and decides, that's how it is. They simply view this as a first studies findings, but they look for future studies by other labs/groups to attempt duplication, usually with larger "n" (study population), and a tweaked study method.

Initial studies are usually small, like this one, so as not to waste a bunch of money on not finding results worth follow-up. Additionally, this is not the published journal so they don't get into all the menutia which you would not understand unless you were a neurologist. Therefore, they might have a strongly supported basis for the brain fibers to be nature, not nurture.

So, if you want to comment on fine detail of such peer-reviewed studies and blast the scientists for poorly considered conclusions, do it through the professional journal where it was published. For scientific studies, NPR is and can only be FYI. Don't knock them for that.

Read the article NPR/Addicts' Brains May Be Wired At Birth For Less Self-Control

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People are so harsh on addicts. It's amazing the lack of empathy we as a culture have towards these individuals.

This research isn't anything especially new, but it is another testament to finding more neurological reasons for people's susceptibility to addiction and also their rehabilitation.

In the article, the Karen states, "Self-control and the ability to regulate your emotions really is an indispensable aspect of the function of the brain that allows us to succeed," And we all know this. But what the article doesn't touch on is that one of the largest causes of having these fibers not work properly or remain fragile is the trauma that an individual goes through. This is why you find more drugs in urban, lower socio-economic areas, or rural areas that offer little in the way of excitement. Of course it is found everywhere, the more extreme cases seem to always be centralized in these two locations.

I hope that instead of building these "lacking" fibers in the brain with drugs, we find early interventions that require activity and focus instead of more chemical dependency.

Otherwise we continue the cycle of despair.

http://www.progressivetransformation.blogspot.com

Read the article NPR/Addicts' Brains May Be Wired At Birth For Less Self-Control

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So we've known similar stuff about alcoholism for decades. The part of this article where you find the scientist saying stuff she has not empirically demonstrated and that posits little "homunculi" inside the human brain is "the part of the brain that decides whether to take a drug is also the part that helps us decide whether to speed through a yellow light or drop out of school".

Parts of the brain don't decide anything, people do. The evidence for this is the existence of all those matched twins who never took any drugs. If the part of the brain did the deciding, there would be no matched twins who never decided to take drugs, all of them would be addicts. My family is high in addiction, and as a family group, also high in recovery, something that the brain worshippers don't study and don't report on. What are the "brain parts" that explain why some identical twins become addicts, and others don't? What are the brain parts that explain the following: of those families that are prone to addiction, what makes some families more prone to successful recovery than others? Brain scientists are wonderful because they have shown how families like mine are diseased. But they are misled by brain fetish, LOL

Read the article NPR/Addicts' Brains May Be Wired At Birth For Less Self-Control

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For those of you blasting this article as people just giving people a pass on their behavior. Remember.. it makes perfect sense when you look at other phenomenon like situational addiction. People become addicted to opiates because of surgery, then kick it with no problems, or like the cases of addicts returning from Vietnam. These men were addicted to heroin, hard core. But once out of the situation and back into their normal lives, most of them were able to get over their addiction and never go back. Some remained life long addicts or ended up in prison as a result of their continued drug use.

Read the article NPR/Addicts' Brains May Be Wired At Birth For Less Self-Control

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