Educational Resources:
How Drugs Hijack the Brain’s Decision-Making
Written and produced by Yale Neuroscience PhD student Clara Liao. Addiction is now understood to be a brain disease. Whether it’s alcohol, prescription pain pills, nicotine, gambling, or something else, overcoming an addiction isn’t as simple as just stopping or exercising greater control over impulses. That’s because addiction develops when the pleasure circuits in the brain get overwhelmed, in a way that can become chronic and sometimes even permanent. This is what’s at play when you hear about reward “systems” or “pathways” and the role of dopamine when it comes to addiction. But what does any of that really mean?
How Depression and Anxiety Affect the Brain
For many people, depression turns out to be one of the most disabling illnesses that we have in society. Despite the treatments that we have available, many people are not responding that well. It's a disorder that can be very disabling in society. It's also a disorder that has medical consequences. By understand the neurobiology of depression we hope to be able more to find the right treatment for the patient suffering from this disease. The current standard of care for the treatment of depression is based on what we call the monoamine deficiency hypothesis. Essentially, presuming that one of three neurotransmitters in the brain is deficient or underactive. But the reality is, there are more than 100 neurotransmitters in the brain. And billions of connections between neurons. So we know that that's a limited hypothesis. Neurotransmitters can be thought of as the chemical messengers within the brain, it's what helps one cell in the brain communicate with another, to pass that message along from one brain region to another.