Eye-opening Research On Drug Addiction That Will Surprise you! 🐀🧠👩‍🔬🤯

Given the choice of being homeless, but being able to use drugs or being able to live in a nice, comfortable home, why in the world would someone choose to be homeless and use drugs? Well, that's what we're going to cover in today's video. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the Shovel Down. I'm Amber Hollingsworth, and this video is all about helping you understand the science, science and psychology of addiction so you can get your life and your loved ones back on track and get back to living the life that you want to live. Now, in today's video, we're going to be taking a look at exactly what happens in the brain that causes people to choose drugs over pretty much everything else in life. And even more so, what makes people choose drugs even in the face of extreme difficulty, consequences, pain, uncomfortableness, you name it. Why do people choose drugs over and over again when it seems like from the outside, it's just not worth it? Now, this video is actually part of a larger series on what causes addiction. And so I'm going to go ahead and tell you that what I'm going to tell you in this video isn't the whole answer, but it is part of the answer. This is the part that the drugs play in addiction. What are the chemicals actually doing that's contributing to this problem? Now, most of us have heard a little something about some rats and putting some boxes and press some levers and get some cocaine or something like that. We're going to take a look at some of those studies and figure out exactly what was happening there and what that science of research tells us about the effects of drugs.

The fascinating thing was that we found in our laboratory that every single drug that increased sensitivity of the animal to brain stimulation was either an abuse substance or a substance that has potential for abuse. So James Old's technique of the 50s gave scientists a way of testing for the addictive potential of drugs.

Now, one of the main things learned from all that rat research is that the primary part of the brain involved in addiction is a part of the brain in the center called the nucleus accumbus. I'm not sure if I'm saying that right. It's kind of hard to say. This is sort of the central hub where you see the most dopamine action in the brain. And remember, dopamine is strongly associated with drive, desire, motivation, and memory. You see, that's the key about dopamine. We don't talk about enough. Not only is it the sort of motivating chemical in Your brain, but it also is highly coordinated to memory. And the reason is, is because when dopamine is released, not only does it make you want to go after, but it makes you remember very strongly what that something is, so that you keep going after it over and over and over again. Now, in some of these rat studies in the 50s or so, the researchers would implant a little wire or cannula into the brain of the rat. And when the rat would press the lever, it would actually stimulate the nucleus accumbens, am I saying it right? Part of the brain, and stimulate that reward, or dopamine part. Now, some rats were more prone to doing this right out the gates. And actually some rats were more resistant to doing it. Now, that already gives us a little bitty clue. That clue being that some of us are more prone to addiction right out the gate than others of us. Actually, there were some studies done with rats that were more sort of genetically prone to addiction and rats that were genetically prone not towards addiction. And as you would imagine, the rats that were more prone to genetically prone to addiction press that lever more often. However, even the rats that were not initially prone to addiction and have a little bit more resistance to addiction, if those rats are given the drug over and over again, they become dependent and they start to act just exactly the same as the other rats. Which means whether or not you have a genetic predisposition, if you take a substance long enough, you get dependent on it, and that dependency can then lead to addiction. In fact, take a look at this study right here, where the rats were trained how to press the lever to get the reward, right? And so after those rats were trained how to press the lever to get the reward, then they changed the experiment on them. Now, the rat actually has to sort of travel across this almost like a bridge in order to press the lever and get the reward. And when they do that, a shock is delivered. So it's painful, basically. And the rats would endure the pain in order to get the drug. Now, let me tell a little secret. The rats will not endure the pain in order to get food. So much so that the rats in the experiment that had to cross the sort of electric bridge to get the food starved themselves to death. Meaning food was not enough of a reward to cause the rat to endure that kind of pain, but the higher reward, the drugs, the stimulation of the nucleus, the cumbents, is, was rewarding enough to cause them to go through the extra uncomfortableness just to get it. Now, you have seen this many times in your life. I have seen this many, many times. How many times have we seen people choose to be homeless, live on the street, be cold, endure all kinds of uncomfortableness, go to jail, lose relationships, lose jobs, because they weren't willing to give up the substance? So it might make you think, what in the world is going on in there? Well, the thing of it is, is when you are addicted, whatever it is that you're addicted to is causing such a bigger release of dopamine than normal. Natural dopamine releasing things would, like food, accomplishing a goal, sex, all that stuff that releases dopamine, it's a rewarding behavior as well, but it doesn't release as much dopamine as the addictive drug does, so the reward is higher. Now, to complicate things for you even a little bit further, after you have those massive good chemical releases, when your brain returns back to normal and the good chemicals go away, you actually go to less of a level than you had to start with. So let's say your dopamine level is here, and then you get the big spike of dopamine. You feel great. Well, then it's going to level out just below there when it's done right. So then you need that dopamine spike just to feel normal. So you need to get up here, but then you feel a little bit lower. And over the course of time, your brain's natural good chemicals become more and more and more deficient, meaning eventually you need the substance just to get to normal, because your baseline is now down here. That is the trapping of the drugs themselves. Now, addiction is very complicated, and there is no one thing, at least that's my belief. There's no one thing that causes addiction. The whole situation is complicated. For example, not only are addictive drugs rewarding and cause the same effect of being willing to endure all kinds of uncomfortableness and pain in order to get the drug, but it impacts other parts of the brain as well. Let's take a look at this rat experiment that was done on how marijuana impacts our ability to perceive time and how cocaine impacts our ability to perceive time.

He's going to test whether these chemicals change the stopwatch mechanism, and that allows the rats to measure time.

So the rats have had their drugs for about 20 minutes now. As you can see, the marijuana rat is mellowed out. The cocaine rat's gotten quite mad and is trying to escape out of this cage here. The saline rat is just acting normally.

So what you're going to see here are three rats. The first rat is given nothing but saline. So Basically, that's your control rat, nothing. These rats have been trained that if they press this lever at exactly the right time, they will get a pellet of food. That exact right time is 12 seconds.

The rat given saline only does this task perfectly and presses the lever after 12 seconds, the correct time.

And as you can see, this saline rack comes in here and does it perfectly. It will time the situation and press the lever at exactly 12 seconds, thereby getting the reward, the food pellet reward. Now take a look now at the cocaine rat.

Next, the rat on cocaine. For this rat, time seems to zip by. It presses the lever after only eight seconds.

As you can see, they're pretty distressed. They're hyperactive, they're all over the place, and they just can't seem to wait long enough, so they rushed it. And did I mention that if you hit the lever too soon or too late, you don't get any food pellet? So the cocaine rats that needed to press it at 12 seconds, and they were pressing it at 8. No reward, no food pellet. Now let's take a look at the rats that were given marijuana.

And lastly, the rat on marijuana. Here, time seems to have ground to a halt. This rat doesn't press until 16 seconds have passed.

The rats on marijuana actually didn't press the lever until 16 seconds. So it's as if time completely stops or slows down to a real crawl for the rats on marijuana and they don't press it soon enough. So what is all this telling us? It's telling us how these drugs cause us to be addicted because they work on that dopamine, that nucleus accompanies part of our brain, but also it's affecting other parts of our brain, that cerebral cortex. That's the thinking part of our brain, and it's impairing that as well. So now you have a whole nother layer of difficulty added on when you're looking at addiction. Here's a completely different, slightly more recent study done on rats looking at the effects of benzodiazepine on empathy. You see, rats are social creatures and they naturally have empathy. If you take a look at this experiment right here, what's going on is they have one rat that's in this tube and it's kind of trapped in there. It can't get itself out. That rat is naturally going to be under a lot of distress. Well, this other rat who's outside of the tube, watch this rat come around and help the trap rat press the lever so that it gets out. Now it's doing that for two reasons. One, it can actually feel the distress of the rat inside the tube. That's called empathy. And two, it gets a natural dopamine release. It gets a natural reward from the helping. It makes it feel better. It feels good about itself because it helped that rat. Now, that's how non addictive rats behave. But take a look at this rat who's given a form of benzodiazepine. Now, benzodiazepine, if you're not sure what that is, it'd be something like Xanax, Klonopin, Valium.

So we give the free rat midazolam, and what we see is they don't open. So that's really amazing.

You see this right here? That has been given the benzodiazepine. It doesn't seem to care at all about the rat that's stuck in the tube. So it doesn't feel the distress. Because remember, benzodiazepine turns off the distressed part of your brain, so it cannot naturally feel the distress from the rat in the tube, thereby not having the appropriate amount of empathy. Now, I bet you're starting to connect the dots about what happens to human beings who are addicted to benzodiazepines. They don't feel the distress signals of the people around them. Their ability for empathy is impaired. How many of you have seen that yourself or even experienced that yourself? As you can see, this whole addiction thing is very complicated. And the part that the actual drugs play is just one part, maybe even the smallest part of addiction. Now, I want you to watch this video next because it gives you a whole different piece to the puzzle of addiction.