Your brain on drugs is like your brain NOT on drugs

Even though I used lots of psychedelic drugs in my college years, my brain is able to readily remember the War on Drugs campaign that featured the slogan, "This is Your Brain on Drugs."

Along with a photo of eggs sizzling in a pan. 

Ooh! Scary! If I take drugs, my brain will be cooked! Well, not really, because I functioned just fine before, during, and after my drug years.

Here's an even better non-anecdotal neuroscientific reason: the brain is always on drugs. If the brain wasn't, it couldn't function. 

So explains Steven Johnson in his book, Mind Wide Open. My wife is "reading" it via an audiobook version. I listened to some of it today while driving around in the car with her. 

Salon's review, "This really is your brain on drugs," included some quotes that I heard in the audiobook.

Our brains are always on drugs, the natural kind; our moods and intellectual states are generated in a seething cauldron of complex chemicals — mind-altering substances with names like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. I (and Steven Johnson) feel high when the ideas are pumping out, and that is not a metaphor.

...Steven Johnson writes, in a chapter titled “The Hormones Talking”: “So begin with this basic premise: you are on drugs. With every shifting mood, every twitch of anxiety, every lovelorn glance, you are experiencing the release of dedicated chemicals in your brains that control your emotions, chemicals fundamentally the same as the ones you might otherwise find in a dime bag or a coke spoon.”

I can't remember the exact quotation Johnson shared, which I think was from Aldous Huxley. The gist of the quote was that whenever someone believes a thought, inspiration, intuition, or whatever is coming from immaterial spirit or soul, they should know that it actually emanates from their own brain.

Their drug-filled brain. Their hormone-filled brain. 

Johnson notes that women sometimes are accused of "being ruled by their hormones" (at certain times of their menstrual cycle, at least). But he says this is unfair. Everybody is ruled by their hormones. Without hormones, the brain wouldn't function.

Men are as affected by the hormone testosterone as women are by estrogen. However, testosterone levels vary less in men than estrogen levels do in women. So the effects of hormones are easier to notice in women.

i enjoyed the portion of "Mind Wide Open" that I heard today.

I already was familiar with most of the ideas Johnson shared, yet he has a knack for saying things freshly (Johnson isn't a neuroscientist, which could explain why he is easy to understand). I was reminded that whenever someone meditates and feels a divine presence, that feeling is based on brain chemicals.

Ditto for any other sort of "supernatural" experience. It's the brain on drugs, doing its thing. 

This fact only will bother people who have a problem with being part of nature. We are physical beings in a physical world. We are connected with everything in existence because we are subject to the laws of nature. 

To me, that is deeply "spiritual" (in the finest materialistic sense of the term). From the Salon review:

As Johnson writes, “Knowing something about the brain’s mechanics — and particularly your brain’s mechanics — widens your own self-awareness as powerfully as any therapy or meditation or drug. Brain science has become an avenue for introspection, a way of bridging the physiological reality of your brain with the mental life you already inhabit.”

Comments

[Skeptic]

I agree with the argument you are making and appreciate the context. However, while your brain was not affected by your youthful level of illicit drug use, some people's brains can be more negatively affected. However, i like where you and Johnson are going with this because it allows for a model of addiction that doesn't demonize some sources more than others. If gambling or the internet or sex or even meditation cult ideas can stimulate the same addictive good feelings chemically in the brain as heroin or cocaine then we can treat all addiction that is negatively affecting a person's life and their families with effective modalities. Of course, as with any addiction, the person has to want treatment, which means he or she recognizes it's become a problem. this isn't likely until the brain's addiction to feeling good has shifted to needing more and more of the chemical to reach the same high, which leads to obsessive seeking behaviour and depression, as well as growing amounts of time spent doing it which interferes with relationships, work, family, other activities and various kinds of self care.

[Skeptic]

Funny I read this blog about addiction posted today.
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/07/21/video-games-are-they-really-a-source-of-addiction/

[cc]

The brain gets high on gratifying, rewarding activity, and when it uses drugs to go directly to the reward without performing the activity, it's said to be addicted. Brains that come by their highness honestly through work deplore and despise addicted brains because they cheat, and their cheating is disruptive in a society where most people earn their feelings of well-being and worth.

Cheaters, on the other hand, mock and ridicule workers because they've found the easy way to get high, and as long as they can maintain a supply of their drug, they can feel superior. But eventually, the side-effects of drug dependency take their toll and the addicted brain is forced to undergo the work of rehabilitation or die.

The brain is addicted to the highness it gets from the drugs it produces, but until it realizes it must go through hell to get to heaven, it will cheat by getting its drugs dishonestly.

[777]

CC said :

""it realizes it must go through hell to get to heaven, it will cheat by getting its drugs dishonestly""

I know an ex coke addict, recently initiated

On hearing the Anahabad Shabd
she said to me

WOW -
What a dealer is This , this Master, and What a Quality , . . totally free !

Her Master is called here GDS

777