Monday, 21 May 2012
The Neurobiology of Charity
As the holiday season approaches, a traditional time for charitable giving, what do we know about this behaviour from a neuroscientific standpoint? Well, first of all, we know that it activates the brain’s dopaminergic reward circuits. We also now know that the old saying “It’s better to give than to receive” has a neurobiological basis: these reward circuits are typically activated more when you give money, for example, than when you receive it. (more…)
Pleasure and Pain | Comments Closed
Monday, 14 May 2012
Links About Brain Anatomy
While I’m doing research on the various subjects that I write about in The Brain from Top to Bottom, I often come across interesting articles on other subjects that I’ve already dealt with elsewhere on the site. Whenever that happens, I save a link to the article, planning to embed it as a Link module on the appropriate page of the site.
The problem is that I accumulate links faster than I can put them where they belong, so I end up with a file full of interesting links that none of my readers can access. To solve this problem, I’ve decided that from time to time, I’ll make a blog post containing all the links that I’ve accumulated about one of the topics on the site. (more…)
From the Simple to the Complex | Comments Closed
Monday, 7 May 2012
Insomnia as a Treatment for Depression
Lack of sleep has a beneficial effect on depression. However counterintuitive this finding may seem, it has been well documented in more than 75 studies published over the past 40 years. One of the reasons that sleep deprivation is not used more extensively in the treatment of depression is that prolonged insomnia can also have significant negative effects on cognitive functioning. Another reason is that insomnia-induced improvements in mood dissipate rapidly when the individuals eventually and inevitably catch up on their sleep. (more…)
Mental Disorders | Comments Closed
Monday, 30 April 2012
Theories on Drug Addiction
The human brain contains circuits that provide us with pleasure to reinforce behaviours that are helpful to our survival. The brain thus naturally favours those behaviours that lead us to seek euphoria. The abusive consumption of a drug can result in dependency on it. The various phenomena associated with drug dependency—also commonly referred to as “drug addiction”—are fairly well known: initial pleasure, then tolerance, withdrawal, and so on. Experts have identified several signs of drug dependency. If someone displays several of them, that is a good indication that they have become dependent on the drug in question. These signs include:
-A persistent desire for the drug and an inability to stop taking it
-The development of a tolerance for the drug that forces them to keep taking larger doses to achieve the same effects
-The onset of withdrawal symptoms when they cannot obtain the drug
-Spending a great deal of their time obtaining the drug, consuming it, and recovering from its effects
-An inability to stop or control their consumption of the drug, even when it goes against their own values
-Continuing to take the drug, even when they recognize the major physical, psychological, and social problems caused by this behaviour
But these phenomena are so complex that it is hard to construct satisfactory models for them. Hence, many theories have been developed to try to explain drug dependency/addiction in order to elaborate the appropriate Drug Addiction Treatments. You can click on the states served by RecoveryDelivered.com for more information about Suboxone in that specific state.
One of these theories is based on the traditional hedonist principle that people seek pleasure and avoid pain. For other theorists, the main cause of drug addiction is the desire to alleviate the suffering that addicts experience when their drug is withdrawn. Still another theory holds that drug-dependent people suffer from a dysfunction of the systems of the frontal cortex that normally regulate decision-making and impose inhibitory controls on behaviour. This dysfunction would result in altered judgment and impulsiveness. One last hypothesis focuses on the idea that individuals’ attitudes toward drugs depend fundamentally on whether the baseline activity of the dopaminergic neurons in their brains is above or below a certain level.
The Intermediate (green) link below takes you to an explanation of one of these theories, the opponent-process theory, complete with diagrams.
The Advanced (red) link takes you to a discussion of some recent neurochemical data that tend to support the effects described in the opponent-process model.
Addiction and the Opponent Process Theory
Addiction and the brain antireward system
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Pleasure and Pain | Comments Closed
Monday, 23 April 2012
Taking Photos To Remember Your Own Life
When people with episodic (autobiographical) memory problems wear a chest-mounted camera that automatically takes 2000 to 3000 photos every day, these photos can help them to remember their past activities. Studies with subjects who had various forms of amnesia showed that photos taken with such a camera let them remember more activities than a diary that they kept for the same purpose.
SenseCam – a device for restoring and protecting memories
A Memorable Device
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Memory and the Brain | Comments Closed
