Within weeks, he was so obsessed with his computer that he ignored everything else. Eventually his obsession destroyed his family. I wasn't paying attention to my son. He'd see dad was just spending all his time on the computer and not doing what he needs to do. I had absolutely no switch that went off in my head that said, okay, that's enough, it just was uncontrollable, it was a runaway train.
Narrator: In much the same way, Parkinson's patient Janice Horn became so obsessed with her university courses that she sometimes did homework for 22 hours a day, she couldn't stop herself. Everything in my brain was completely focussed on just the one thing, everything else just got, got left behind. Narrator: Terry Komadowski can sympathize. After receiving a Parkinson's drug, he began to gamble obsessively. Casinos are a real big draw for me, like, the feeling of winning and anticipation was so great it was hard just to stay away, and it got to the point where my wife had to come in and pull me out. Narrator: What was causing their compulsive behaviour? Upon closer inspection, what surfaced was that it was the medications that they were on. These medications raised the level of a chemical known as a dopamine. A problem in Parkinson's is that dopamine is too low, but when you raise it, that helps with the motor symptoms, but dopamine is also involved in the reward systems. Narrator: With raised levels of dopamine in their brains, some Parkinson's patients can no longer control their impulses. Most commonly this side effect shows up as a gambling addiction. Physicians are instructed if this happens to their patients, just dial down the dosage. Now when you look at somebody and you say, "Oh, you're a compulsive gambler, why don't you just stop doing it?" It's not so easy because their chemicals are dialled around just a little bit and that totally changes their behaviour. Narrator: Eagleman points out that drug addiction is similar. Chemical messengers disrupt the way the brain processes information causing uncontrollable craving and decreased impulse control. For almost all drugs addicts, they want to quit, but they find themselves unable. Why? Because the drugs plug into these very ancient systems in our brains, these reward systems, and these drugs jump right onto there and tell the brain essentially this is the best thing that's ever happened to you, and those reward systems are in there to steer us towards our next decisions. Neuroscience offers a number of pathways to cure drug addiction, to actually help people to get over the addiction, and that's, I think, a prime area where instead of just putting people in jail, neuroscience can come to the legal system and say here's an alternative. Narrator: Eagleman is experimenting with an alternative treatment that he calls "the prefrontal workout". A subject who is addicted to crack cocaine is placed in the MRI machine and given real time feedback of his own brain waves. The idea is if he can see the activity in his brain, he can concentrate on reducing his craving for cocaine and strengthen that part of the brain that controls his impulses. We show them pictures of crack cocaine, and we ask them to go ahead and crave, well that's easy for them to do, and that lights up particular networks in their brain that are involved in that craving and we can measure those. Now we show them other pictures, and we ask them to suppress that craving, and that lights up a different set of networks that are involved in suppression of impulses, so we can measure the activity in those networks. Now, as we show them more pictures of the crack cocaine and the paraphernalia, we ask them to suppress their craving, and what we do is we visually present to them what looks like a speedometer that can move between craving and suppressing.
2 Comments
7/6/2022 11:22:03 pm
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AuthorLinda Peterson is a founder of Gambling Blog. She writes articles on gambling topics for popular websites, such as Casinoslots Gambling Directory. Linda is from Las Vegas. Gambling is in her blood. ArchivesCategories |