The Meaning of Life and Other Vegetables

Hello everyone.

In my previous post, I expressed my interest in Dopamine, addiction and related topics. In that post I also speculated – lay person style – on the internal workings of the experiencing pleasure. This post is not a direct continuation of that line of thinking, but it’s in the same realm.

Having spent some time thinking about these topics, I’d like to suggest that the addict’s craving – that ruthless striving to get the next fix – is mostly driven by seeking to relieve bodily pain (or another sharp bodily distress), or anxiety, or another acute (meaning, prominent but not permanent) mental distress. All of these might express as elevated levels of Cortisol, or as elevated activity in the Amygdala, or some other physiological, detectable metric.

This is lay person speculation, of course. The physiological details are not too important for today’s post. The important point is that that “flag” would be able to trigger a certain cascade (in which Dopamine might have one role or another), that would lead to retrieving certain memories previously rendered as relevant, and likely useful, in relieving that state of distress, and later acting upon them. In simple words, ways of obtaining the fix.

But what about situations in which no pain (physical or otherwise) or anxiety are experienced? There may still be situations where a great, but “non-painful”, compulsion is felt towards Using (the general term referring to succumbing to the addiction’s subject – be it a substance or a behaviour). Neuroscience professionals are using the term Habit a lot in that context – the person is seemingly pursuing something “out of a habit”, without a clear beneficial reason. but I feel that Habit is a little inappropriate; it’s something much more powerful. There must be a mechanism in us, in which some trigger (let’s leave that trigger undefined for now) sets off a cascade (the same one as for relieving addiction-induced pain, or a different one) that identifies the applicable “stored information”, derives actionable steps from it, and pushes these steps into our action pipeline. If that is how it works in principle, the compulsion felt by the addict in that situation would simply be that push.

I realise that in early-stage / light addictions the craving might be directly pleasure-driven (or other positive reward-driven). Contemplating the internal workings in those situations is also interesting, but my current interest is more in harder, more fully-developed addictions, where life consequences for the addict are severe, and getting unhooked is much more difficult. More often than not (at least in my impression), addictions are progressive, and even where the process takes a long time most cases end up in the pain / “blind” compulsion domain, leaving the early pleasure-drive days far behind, a distant memory.

Both cases I speculated – let’s crudely call them distress-driven craving and blind compulsion (non-painful) craving – would require that the behaviour activation cascade would somehow be coded in the individual.

The first, obvious way would be hard wiring in the DNA. The statistical accumulated experience of the individual’s ancestors simply determined that certain actions, given the trigger’s presence, would likely result in not only lowering the “flag” (for example, Cortisol level), but also to improved preservation (and maybe even procreation) odds. DNA versions that didn’t code for such action patterns didn’t fare as well; the ones that did, survived up to present day, and are hence able to manifest those “useful” patterns. This way of coding is quite trivial and less interesting to me in the current context.

Another way, maybe a little less obvious, is having some sort of internal “etching” mechanism. By that I mean that no hard-wired “best practices” exist in the individual upfront, but it’s more than just “plain learning”. It must be a mechanism that has the following 2 characteristics:
1. Once a certain pattern is established, overwriting is hard (but not completely impossible); and
2. The imperative to act upon an established pattern is very strong (hence, for example, said compulsion).
I feel that etching is a good name for that kind of learning, because it’s quite permanent but not completely irreversible (one can always etch over, I guess).
Needless to say, if such a mechanism indeed exists, it is because it provided an evolutionary advantage. It would make sense to me around drives directly related to biological benefit – for example: take care of an ugly lesion even if it doesn’t hurt, consume carbohydrates, have sex. The initial learning might be driven directly by pleasure or pain, but once etched, the pattern may be driven by what would feel like anxiety or simply a blind compulsion. Obviously, human evolution took place before artificial chemical synthesis kicked in, so it’s not surprising that such a mechanism goes haywire when neurobiology is hijacked by extremely potent chemicals like Cocaine or Heroine.

To wrap up this post, I only want to add that currently there seems to be quite a broad agreement that Dopamine is a player (maybe the main one) in such an etching mechanism and the trigger-to-craving-to-activation cascade that it promotes. Whether that statement is true, and if it is, how exactly it works, I’m not sure. But I feel it’s a good framework for further learning, for hypotheses wording, and maybe even for actual experimental research.

See you next time.

Peace to all.

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Did you know…? There are more posts in this blog than are presented to you right now. It’s an attribute of the template which I can’t change.
How to see all of them?
Click on the header – the bold “The Meaning of Life and Other Vegetables” at the top. You’ll get a list (which is not complete either), with a button at the bottom to access the next list, and so on. Those go all the way back to my first post in this blog.
Enjoy Reading!