Posted by Helen on: 07.10.2007 /
TIME has an interesting article this week about addictions and treatment for them: How We Get Addicted.
Along with the article, there’s an interesting, dramatic demonstration of what happens to the brain of a cocaine addict. Go here and click on ‘addiction and brain activity’. Then move the slider across and watch how a person’s brain changes when they use cocaine.
The article discusses about these changes too, but I think the graphic is particularly effective.
Comment by: Eliza
1 07/10/07 7:24 AM | Comment Link |Very interesting. The pictures of the scans also act as Rorschach test - I see a cat in the 1st one, and an angry tooth (?!) in the middle one.
A word of caution on the scans: they are from 2 different people. (The one on the left is a non-user, the middle and right-hand ones are of a former user.) The differences, while presented with assumption that the drug is to blame, could be from other causes (including some factor which led the person to use drugs, rather than resulted from drug use). We assume, but don’t know, that the user’s brain used to look like the one on the left, & should look like that, & is getting back to that pattern.
(Thus said the lifelong skeptic & sometime-reviewer-of-papers-for-peer reviewed-medical-journals…!)
Comment by: Helen
2 07/10/07 9:45 AM | Comment Link |Thanks Eliza - I hadn’t noticed the scans weren’t all of the same person! I appreciate you pointing that out to less observant people like me :)
I didn’t look at them long enough to start thinking about what they looked like. Either that or you have more imagination than me!
Comment by: fish
3 07/10/07 2:50 PM | Comment Link |i can relate to the article. i am addicted to nicotine. i used to use smokeless tobacco (dip, copenhagen) for off and on about 13 years. i quit this january after my wife discovered i had started using again.
the addiction does mess with your brain and make you believe you need it at this time or that time. you start planning your day about when you’ll get your fix. its pretty pathetic.
today is the 170th day of my quit. i have found a website called quitsmokeless.org that has helped me tremendously. if not for that site i would have started up again by now.
if anyone else is struggling with this same addiction, contact me or at least go to the website.
Comment by: Helen
4 07/10/07 4:33 PM | Comment Link |170 days…wow, that’s awesome, fish! Congratulations! And thanks for the site recommendation.