Author: Marc

Since most of us seem to be in vacation mode, myself included, I’m stealing the following passage from Shaun Shelly (with his permission). He in turn took it from Richard Wilmot, author of “American Euphoria: Saying ‘Know’ to Drugs“. The passage compares religious commitments to the commitments made by drug addicts (deals with the devil?). Here I’m printing a shortened version. For the full passage, and for some intriguing reflections on its implications, please see Shaun’s blog. I’m sending you there, partly because this such an unusual idea, but also because Shaun’s blog/newsletter is definitely worth exploring more broadly.

“Today one of the main criteria for a diagnosis of drug addiction/alcoholism is: continuing to consume alcohol or another drug “despite unpleasant or adverse consequences” (DSM). For the Christian martyrs the same criteria would apply. People of that time and place—Rome, 2nd century A.D.—could also say that this new Christianity was like a drug that endangered lives and that being a Christian had all the adverse financial, social, psychological and physical consequences that we now see in the lives of drug addicts and alcoholics. And yet Christians, of all ages, in spite of the consequences, continued to profess their faith… and continued to be eaten by lions.

Obviously there was something to Christianity that prevented the Christian from being abstinent from Christianity. It was something internal… an internal euphoria. It was something that could not be seen but nevertheless was something that was felt… and felt as something awesomely significant. It was something that made all the pain and suffering worthwhile: it was a religious experience.

Likewise, given contemporary social policy, adverse consequences befall those who abuse drugs. They lose the respect of their peers; they violate the expectations of family, friends, and colleagues; they miss out on educational opportunities; they have poor work performance and lose their job. They make harmful decisions. They “burn their bridges”. Their health suffers; they have overdoses, and they die.

My initial reaction to this quote was one of bemusement more than anything else. Okay, very provocative, but is there a serious point here? Is the comparison between religion and addiction just a high-level play on words? Just a number of descriptors — dedication, single-mindedness, sacrifice, isolation — that make glib connections between two fundamentally different phenomena? That was my hunch. But then I looked briefly at Wilmot’s book. He makes the case (as do others) that the urge to get high is a natural proclivity, that we all seek what are often called “peak experiences.”  In fact, this idea is not much different from the idea of a God gene, as elaborated by Shaun. So not only might we be (at least partially) hard-wired to seek religious meaning, and to seek the sort of peak experiences that come through drugs, but maybe it’s the same urge, channelled in different ways.

Then more parallels came to mind. For me, people who are intensely religious are as scary as people who are intensely addicted. Both types are impossible to engage in any meaningful dialogue, they notice only what is of immediate relevance to their particular attraction, and they devalue others’ rights, opinions, and wellbeing in their pursuit of gratification. And here’s another parallel: religion and addiction look similar to one another at two different stages. Early on, religious zeal and drug attraction are exciting, often creative, and highly fulfilling. But twenty years later, both look like shit. The dogmatic, rigidified, perseverative ramblings of a long-term religious zealot are not much different in tone, quality, or relevance than those of the long-term addict. What was once an exhilarating journey of self-realization has become a bleary-eyed funeral march.

So, maybe the comparison is more enlightened than I first thought. But make sure you go and visit Shaun’s blog to see what he has to say about it.

By Margôt Tesch…

A note from me (Marc):

This self-trust thing….it’s like a hardy weed. It keeps spreading, and now it’s bursting out in all kinds of places. Margôt Tesch, a member of this blog community, trusted her future self to help her curb her drinking. And it worked. This post is her description of the process she used and the impact it’s having on her life. The only thing I can add is that it makes me very happy…that an idea that emerged from my reflections on my own life can become a method for helping others. The rest is Margôt’s account:

I read Marc’s blog on Self Trust some weeks ago. At the time I read it, it resonated profoundly and sparked some immediate actions and changes in my life. Marc talked about the need to let the future self take control. It seemed to be exactly what I needed to hear at just the right time.

I have been aware of my addiction to alcohol for many years now. I try to be honest in my self-talk, i.e. acknowledge that I do have an addiction even though I manage it by constraining my indulgence so that I do not behave anti-socially. But drinking is something I do every day. That’s an addiction.

I have wanted to change my dependence on alcohol for a very long time and had even been thinking recently about my lack of self-trust in this area. You know, how you have a big night and a hangover and you decide “That’s it” … until about 5 the next day. Many of you will know the cycle. It’s ridiculous, but we act it out over and over again. Just as Marc points out, it erodes our self-trust.

I lead quite a disciplined life. I eat well, exercise regularly etc. As well, I have created a habit of goal setting and know how to push myself through to achieve things; for example, challenging adventure hikes, long distance running — the list goes on. Further, many years ago I overcame a serious food addiction which lasted over a decade. I also gave up smoking, though that was some 30 years ago now. So I have reason to trust myself. I have a sense of confidence that I can do difficult things if I set my mind to it.

I’ve always known that I could stop drinking and actually believed that I would stop. I’ve just been waiting for the right impetus, the right motivation to give me the reason to stop. Knowing that drinking habitually has health implications has not been enough. I guess I’ve been waiting for the health crisis. But when you stop and think about it, that’s pretty crazy. Why wait for the health impact to eventuate. Why not stop now and prevent it?

These thoughts had been going around and around in my head, but still I persisted to drink daily. When I read Marc’s blog in preparation for his TED talk, all this thinking came together in a moment of clarity. Suddenly I perceived “my future self” as an identity that could take control…now! I had always believed that this was possible, that my “future self” would one day do it, but Marc’s words made me realise I didn’t need to wait. My future self was actually inside me. I already believed in her. So I was able to merge the perception of my future self with the perception of who I am now, today. I/we became one. This simple shift in thinking gave me the sense of self-trust I needed to take control in a matter-of-fact way.

It worked. I had my first drink-free night for a long time. My husband even poured me a drink; I accepted it but couldn’t drink it. My future self was in control and was able to think clearly about the benefits of stopping (short term pain for long term gain).

In a way it was a relief — no more cognitive dissonance.

It’s been several weeks now. My husband also read the post and decided to join me, and I have to admit, that’s made it easier. We have achieved what we set out to do so far, no drinking during the week, and we are working to limit our weekend consumption to “reasonable” amounts (which means no hangover). So far that has probably been the greatest challenge. The first night after a period of abstinence is high risk as there is some compulsion in giving yourself permission to drink again, to over-indulge. But we are working on it.

My plan is to make this behaviour part of our routine so that it just feels “normal” not to drink every day; let a new set of habits and behaviours emerge. Already we have noticed we are more alert in the early evening and able to use the regained time for more cognitive activities, rather than just watching the TV.

We aren’t there yet and a trip overseas visiting family has set us back a bit. But now that we are home, the work begins anew.

Here are some notes that I refer to when I need to regain the initial impetus:

• Future health gets sacrificed for immediate gratification (i.e. too much dopamine production).
• Believe in my capacity for self-control (reduces ego depletion).
• Maintain a dialogue between my future self and me.
• Things will get better.

I really appreciate Marc’s thinking and theory in this area. It has helped to change my life.

Note (from Marc): Please see the new blog by Ken Anderson in Psychology Today. Ken is the founder of HAMS, a group that supports “Harm Reduction” approaches. Margot’s self-styled method is a great example of Harm Reduction.

What I’ve called self-trust in recent posts can be paraphrased as compassion. Compassion for oneself. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been exposed to the Buddhist perspective, which clearly sees compassion for others and compassion for oneself as two sides of the same coin. Compassion, or love, or trust, is considered a kind of natural state once all the cognitive cobwebs get cleared away. But how do you achieve it?

Meditation, of course.

So while I’m cruising the canals of the Netherlands, the next four days, with a great horde of relatives (my wife’s family), quite likely to tip over and sink, either physically or emotionally, or both, I’ll leave you with a description of a great little study by David DeSteno, a professor at Northeastern University. Here’s the link, but I’m pasting most of the article below to save you the trouble of clicking on it. (Now, that’s compassion.)

This article was brought to my attention by someone whom I’d love to acknowledge, except that I can’t remember who it was. Very embarrassing. If you’d like to step forward and receive due credit, then please do.

One more thought before you read the article. I’ve recently been perusing a lot of the literature on the neuroscience of meditation. The state of the art amounts to what’s usually known as a dog’s breakfast, not to be confused with a god’s breakfast. It’s a mess of overlapping and sometimes discrepant findings. But there’s one bit of the brain that reliably lights up as a result of meditation training: a wee bit of cortex called the insula — a structure that is thought to mediate enteroception, the feelings one gets from one’s own body. When you are consciously feeling your feelings, whether sadness, anxiety, fatigue, or pain, it’s the insula that’s giving you the message. So, meditators seem to be able to switch on that conscious state of feeling more easily than controls.

Maybe that’s no big surprise. But here’s the cool part: insula activation is a reliable correlate of empathy, induced through various experimental protocols, like looking at pictures of people who are suffering. In other words, you have to be able to feel your own feelings in order to feel empathy. Meditation seems to improve that ability. And given the results of the following study, that can translate into being good to others as well as good to yourself.

MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing. A number of “mindfulness” training programs, like that developed by the engineer Chade-Meng Tan at Google, and conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and tech leaders, promise attendees insight into how meditation can be used to augment individual performance, leadership and productivity.

This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable) pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation was originally intended. Gaining competitive advantage on exams and increasing creativity in business weren’t of the utmost concern to the Buddha and other early meditation teachers. As the Buddha himself said, “I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of suffering.” For him, as for many modern spiritual leaders, the goal of meditation was as simple as that. The heightened focus on and insight into one’s own  mind, offered by meditation, plus the enhanced cognitive skills of clarity and self-regulation, were supposed to help practitioners see the world in a new way — in which  we are no longer the center of the universe. And that’s what allows for compassion — a genuine regard of other people and an intrinsic wish to end their suffering as well as our own. And a relaxation of the habitual categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.

But does meditation work as promised? Is its originally intended effect — the reduction of suffering — empirically demonstrable?

To put the question to the test, my lab, led in this work by the psychologist Paul Condon, joined with the neuroscientist Gaëlle Desbordes and the Buddhist lama Willa Miller to conduct an experiment whose publication is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science. We recruited 39 people from the Boston area who were willing to take part in an eight-week course on meditation (and who had never taken any such course before). We then randomly assigned 20 of them to take part in weekly meditation classes, which also required them to practice at home using guided recordings. The remaining 19 were told that they had been placed on a waiting list for a future course.

After the eight-week period of instruction, we invited the participants to the lab for an experiment that purported to examine their memory, attention and related cognitive abilities. But as you might anticipate, what actually interested us was whether those who had been meditating would exhibit greater compassion in the face of suffering. To find out, we staged a situation designed to test the participants’ behavior before they were aware that the experiment had begun.

WHEN a participant entered the waiting area for our lab, he (or she) found three chairs, two of which were already occupied. Naturally, he sat in the remaining chair. As he waited, a fourth person, using crutches and wearing a boot for a broken foot, entered the room and audibly sighed in pain as she leaned uncomfortably against a wall. The other two people in the room — who, like the woman on crutches, secretly worked for us — ignored the woman, thus confronting the participant with a moral quandary. Would he act compassionately, giving up his chair for her, or selfishly ignore her plight?

The results were striking. Although only 16 percent of the nonmeditators gave up their seats — an admittedly disheartening fact — the proportion rose to 50 percent among those who had meditated. This increase is impressive not solely because it occurred after only eight weeks of meditation, but also because it did so within the context of a situation known to inhibit considerate behavior: witnessing others ignoring a person in distress — what psychologists call the bystander effect — reduces the odds that any single individual will help. Nonetheless, the meditation increased the compassionate response threefold.

…recent findings by the neuroscientists Helen Weng, Richard Davidson and colleagues confirm that even relatively brief training in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain areas associated with empathic understanding of others’ distress — areas whose responsiveness is also modulated by a person’s degree of felt associations with others. [see my comments on the insula!]

So take heart. The next time you meditate, know that you’re not just benefiting yourself, you’re also benefiting your neighbors, community members and as-yet-unknown strangers by increasing the odds that you’ll feel their pain when the time comes, and act to lessen it as well.

 

 

 

Here’s a little postscript. Some of you have questioned the liking vs. wanting paradigm, because these states are imputed by the experimenter. Where’s the evidence that the rat is actually feeling liking — or not feeling it, as was the case with the salt-delivery lever? Who’s to say what rats are feeling, anyway? I mean we don’t ask them to report on their inner states or to fill out questionnaires following the experiment.

So here’s a little video provided by Kent Berridge. It shows facial  movements that are thought to correspond with liking — mainly based on the assumption that sugar is a natural and fundamental source of pleasure, for rats and humans both. But also based on similarities between rodent and human facial movements.

Berridge has used rat facial expressions to impute pleasure in a number of experiments. And the second expression shown — displeasure — would be what the rats showed to the salt solution, despite their strong attraction to the lever that delivered it.

Baby & rat taste ‘liking’ Berridge lab video 2010

I want to start unraveling the talks I heard, beginning with Kent Berridge’s talk. If you haven’t been following this blog or read my book, here’s some background: Berridge has made two major contributions to the study of addiction. The first is the idea that “wanting” and “liking” are independent neural systems. Wanting (or craving, as we understand it in addiction) is mostly fueled by dopamine, which is sent from the midbrain to the nucleus accumbens (NACC; or ventral striatum), a major center for goal-directed pursuit, lying in the middle of the brain, deep within the cortex and surrounded by the limbic structures. Here’s that slide once again. The NACC is represented by that yellow explosion, to convey the growth of craving over a matter of seconds or minutes. On the other hand, liking (or pleasure) is provided by — guess what? — opioids, whether they come from your local dealer or from the natural processes of your own brain (the hypothalamus produces opioids, which are critical for calming us down and relieving pain). The idea that wanting and liking are truly dissociable is pretty radical, both in psychology and in neuroscience. In the present post, I want to tell you about Kent’s recent research, as reported in Boston two weeks ago, where he demonstrates this independence — in that pristine way scientists have of breaking things down to their fundamental components.

Berridge’s other main contribution is the idea of incentive sensitization. This is the notion that particular cues or stimuli (whether out there in the world or generated from our own fantasies, memories, daydreams, etc) become strongly associated with our drug or drink of choice. And those cues — all by themselves — activate the wanting circuit. They directly release dopamine to the NACC, so that we find ourselves suddenly beset by craving, simply by exposure to a cue. The strength of that incentive sensitization obviously increases the more often we use, because the experience itself serves to reinforce the association with the cue. But I won’t discuss this further for now.

Okay, so Kent gets up in front of this group of 15 or so people, including only two other neuro people (Davidson and me). And he’s explaining his recent research with rats, in which he’s set out to show that wanting and liking truly are separate systems. He wants to get his message across to the group, of course, but the main goal is to develop a talk that will be of interest to you-know-who. He wants, we want, the Dalai Lama to say: Hey that’s really cool! Now I get how you can want something without even liking it! For Kent, and for me, this issue gets to the heart of the problem of desire — a problem which is as central to Buddhist psychology as it is to addiction psychology.

So here’s the experiment: The rat is “trained” to press a lever that delivers a sweet solution. This is a very typical “Skinnerian” learning paradigm. Rats love sweetness — don’t we all? — and it’s been shown that sugar speaks directly to those opioid-fueled cells in the NACC. So here’s a rat that has experienced liking which has led to wanting, in the very natural way that we are “trained” to go after rewarding experiences in life. So they are willing to press the lever many times over, as motivated by their wanting for the sweet taste — and as shown, through other studies, to depend on the flow of dopamine following that initial opioid rush.

But there’s another lever in the cage. When the rat presses it, just in the process of exploring its environment, it delivers a very salty taste. Kent is sitting in front of his computer, at the end of the table near the screen, and he looks up at us, wanting to get across how very nasty this liquid tastes to the poor rat. Imagine the taste of sea water, he says. Now imagine something that’s at least 10 times saltier — beyond the level of the Dead Sea. And I feel like I’m glimpsing the soul of this scientist. He is right there in the minds of his rats, trying to imagine — and communicate — what they are experiencing. Because that’s the necessary link here. The connection between experience and behavior. And if you’re studying it in rats rather than humans, you’d better be able to imagine what it’s like to be a rat. Anyway, the rats don’t need another trial to learn to stay away from lever #2. They hate what it gives them. There is no pleasure to be had there.

Now here comes the essence of being a good scientist: being clever enough to find the fracture point where you can split a phenomenon into its parts. We’ve got liking and wanting for lever #1. And zero liking or wanting for lever #2. Then the experimenter gives the rat a drug that reduces their blood level of sodium way below normal. They become salt-deprived. And now the punchline: The rats immediately go to lever #2 and start pressing like hell. Kent and his assistants have completely bypassed liking to get to wanting. There is clearly a high degree of wanting present, but there was never — not even once — an experience of liking that led to it.

Half the people in the room didn’t get it at all. So…the rats were salt-deprived. So they went after the salt lever? So what? Kent read their blank expressions and tried his best to convey what was so cool here. I sensed his disappointment. Who wants to go to all that trouble and have the punchline fall flat? The rats didn’t know they were salt-deprived, he explained. But the wanting circuit was immediately activated by something, some change in their biological state. It doesn’t really matter what activated it. The point is, wanting does not have to arise from liking. It’s an independent process, in mind and brain. It can arise from anything!

For me, the parallels with addiction were immediately striking. That sudden wanting, craving, compulsion that we experience for our drug of choice doesn’t have to depend on how much we liked it in the past — either the distant past or the recent past. You can crave something that you’ve never liked — just because, at some level, you need it. Granted, with drugs and booze, there is usually pleasure the first many times, then the pleasure fades, and after awhile there is no pleasure. Not even the anticipation of pleasure. The wanting comes from needing it, not from liking it. (Mind you, with tobacco, it seems you never have to experience any pleasure to graduate to craving.) So addiction is sort of like the rat experiment with a hunk of time subtracted out. After we become addicted, wanting has nothing to do with how much we do or did like it.

Following some questions and discussion, I think most of the group got it. You had to go right into Kent’s world — the world of a scientist as clever as he is determined. The point wasn’t what caused the sudden wanting. The point was simply that wanting and liking can be shown to be totally independent processes. Will the Dalai Lama get it? Will it help him, and the rest of us, understand something crucial about addiction?

Let’s hope so.