"(T)o differentiate between irresistible and unresisted impulses"

I've been intrigued by the media fascination with "sex addiction" for some time now. I've been waiting for someone to finally say this:

(T)he more I study it, the more sceptical I have become that sex addiction is a genuine condition...Do these (people) really have an illness that renders them incapable of resisting temptation? (...) its convenient for a bad choice to be repackaged as a disease and it's in that person's interests for the outside world sees their behaviour that way.

Not much else to say, really. The semester is ending, I've been lazy with the blog for a couple months, and I'll be away for much of the summer. But I have to point out: I keep noting how odd it is that mental illness is commonly covered in the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times. I thought that probably a weird American thing. But look, this article is also in the Life & Style section of the UK newspaper. Interestingly, under the subsections Women & Relationships.

Posted at Reverse Sickology

What does "Reverse Sickology" mean? This article says is all...

Life: A medical condition

(I)t seems that a new illness is invented every week, covering every potential quirk in human behaviour...Is the human condition becoming a medical condition? (snip) (I)t is estimated that 10% of US children take Ritalin to combat behaviour problems. (snip) "If you look at the American Psychiatric Association 'bible', you'll see almost every piece of human behaviour can be classified as being in some way aberrant."

Note: When I say the article "says it all" I don't necessarily mean I agree with the politics advocated in the article.

My Neurons Saw Jesus on a Grilled Cheese Sandwich

I’m leafing through the current issue of Time while in the doctor’s office, and stumble upon an article on “Faith & Healing: A Forum.” It seems to be a moderated panel of three people discussing faith, science, and health.

The “moderator” is often ridiculous. To one panelist: “(Y)ou are careful not to talk about humans as being hardwired for religion, because hardwiring implies a hardwirer, and science hasn't yet established that.” First, when humans are described as being hardwired, it generally refers to the fact that the brain consists of electrochemical neural circuits, and thus, talking about people being hardwired in no way implies a hardwirer. And second…Yet? Science hasn’t established a hardwirer “yet”? Science hasn’t established that the moon is made of green cheese, either. Not yet, at least.

Anyway, one panelist, Richard Sloan, addresses “the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations,” which I just blogged on. He does it quite well, so I thought I’d mention it here.

TIME: (C)an't the tools of science (brain scans and the like) be used to teach us about the subjective experience of religion?

Sloan: Let me ask you a different question. Would it be meaningful if we did a brain scan of someone before and after eating cheese? I don't understand the value of developing beautiful images, very appealing, aesthetic images of brain scans and people engaged in various religious experiences. I don't see the value any more than imaging people while eating cheese.

TIME: We explore what the brain looks like in depressed people, in people struggling with memory issues ...

Sloan: But why? To understand how the brain works so we can develop interventions to treat depression and to treat memory loss. And that's absolutely appropriate. Are there interventions that will come from [imaging religious experiences]? (…) (T)here's a seductive appeal about neuroscience explanations, that there must be something significant here because you can see it in the brain scan. We're infatuated with neuroscience because of the very beautiful images that we can see, but the real question is, What do those images tell us that's of any value, whether it's basic science or applied?

On an unrelated note, the magazine issue also has an article on one of my favorite authors, Donald Barthelme. Read my favorite story of his - “The School” - here. Buy an essay on the story because you’re too lazy to write 843 words (and hope your instructors are really stupid) here.

Emotional Brain: Rational Brain as Right Brain: _____ Brain (answer: "Left")

The serotonin, dopamine, and other neurotransmitters in my brain have got me thinking that I'm going to start attending more to the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. One of my favorite types of psychology research is that which investigates the effectiveness of psychology research. Recent research has started to investigate what happens when an author throws in arbitrary brain information when explaining behaviors.

In this study, for example, subjects were given poorly reasoned faux scientific articles to evaluate, with or without random pictures of a brain scan. In effect, both groups read the same nonsense, but one group had a picture of a brain included in the nonsense. Those who saw the picture of the brain thought the nonsense more convincing than those who didn’t.

In this study, rather than using brain pictures, the authors included arbitrary brain words (“Hey, look, dopamine!”) and found a similar result, concluding:

Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation...(N)euroscience information...irrelevant to the logic of (an) explanation...had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts' judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

What the studies indicate is that completely irrelevant brain information - words or pictures - sways people to think that an argument about behavior is better than it actually is.

Which brings me to this article: Now think again: making the right decision calls for the heart as well as the head:

I once bought a pair of shoes that didn’t fit. I blame my brain. I was a victim of a dopamine rush. That pesky neurotransmitter had been primed by previous shopping highs to flood my brain with the desire to take another hit...That’s what dopamine does. It rewards successful strategies and, as soon as it finds one, it looks for more. So here’s the problem: dopamine is rational — it finds things that work and tries to do them again. But that makes you take irrational decisions.

I like the article. The article is a review of the book How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. It does a good job highlighting research that indicates how we often make irrational decisions. But, even ignoring the basic "My stupid decisions aren't my fault" premise, I have to ask: What's with the arbitrary dopamine info? In the article, the author discusses several scientific studies, none of which involve dopamine. First, the author relates the story of Eliot, reported as a case study in Eliot Demasio’s excellent book Descartes’ Error. Eliot’s issue is not about dopamine activity, though, but is instead about structural damage to the brain. All of the other studies mentioned deal with the effects of a manipulation of the social environment on decision making – none deal with dopamine.

So if none of the research in the article deals with dopamine, but the author name-drops the neurotransmitter like Eminem with Carson Daly (Carson Daly? Yeah, that’ll sustain your music career), I can only assume the author is utilizing the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations.

The interview below, with the author of the book discussed in the "dopamine" article, is an excellent example. Seriously, did he just say, "I can feel my rational brain, my prefrontal cortex, go into overdrive..."?

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Jonah Lehrer

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Rap Battle
NASA Name Contest

I'm all for metacognition. But if "thinking about thinking" leads you to the conclusion that dopamine caused you to buy shoes, you might not be thinking that well about thinking.

Posted at Reverse Sickology

The Uncontrollable Desire to call Addiction a Disease is a Disease

I can’t come up with any other reason for such crappy argumentation being published in the Wall Street Journal. The urge to call addiction a disease has become an epidemic itself. Here’s GW Bush’s former director of the White House Office of National Drug Policy:

Substance abuse is a disease. Until recently, we failed to grasp the nature of this disease and how to reduce the suffering it causes… We have paid a high price for this confusion.

So how do we reduce the suffering caused by this disease?

The criminal justice system has become the most powerful force in the country supporting addiction treatment…

Aha. So it is a disease best treated through the criminal justice system. Perhaps we’ve been wasting our time trying to find a cure for cancer. Perhaps we should just make it illegal and see if that’ll solve it. I don’t accept the position that addiction is a disease, but if it were, wouldn’t it be better treated (as this article argues – thanks to Justin for the link) as a public health issue than a law and order issue? Can anyone name a single other disease that is best treated by the criminal justice system? Am I missing one?

Wait, the author indeed argues addiction will start to be treated as a public health issue. He says:

Intervention is spreading in the health-care system with the prospect that screening for substance abuse will become as common as checking blood pressure for hypertension.

Excellent strategy. I say we start arresting those who test positive for high blood pressure and hypertension. Nip those problems in the bud.

What might fascinate me most about this argument is that the author seems to believe readers will have no knowledge of history. Several times when talking about addictive drugs, he mentions alcohol. But when discussing the prospect of legalizing drugs, he says this:

No nation that has tried to avoid controlling supply has been able to stand by its permissive approach.

Isn’t that the *exact opposite* of what happened with alcohol? Didn’t we try to control supply, and then revert? Finally, he addresses an issue I mentioned recently – drug related violence in Mexico. He says,

Today there is terrible violence in Mexico. Those who carry out attacks do so with the intention of making us stop resisting them…Making it easier to produce and traffic drugs will strengthen, not weaken, these terrorists.

But this is nonsense. Yes, making it easier to produce and traffic *illegal* drugs will strengthen Mexican drug cartels. Give me a Celebrity Death Match between a Mexican drug cartel and an American/Internationl Pharmaceutical company, though, and my money’s on the Pharm company. If the drugs people wanted were legal, any US drug company could bitchslap a Mexican drug kingpin faster than you can say, “Let’s get it on.”



Posted at Reverse Sickology

It isn't my fault if this post is false

This article is a review of a new book on addiction. The book sounds quite interesting. Not having read it, I can only comment on the book author's perspective from the second-hand view of the author of the book review. Still, just a couple comments about the book author's perspective. He claims that most families of addicts:

"erroneously believe that willpower is their loved one’s main problem” and that this belief indicates “cultural confusion and apathy..."

So, to believe that an addict's problems are, at least in part, the result of a lack of willpower is erroneous and indicative of confusion. For it to be true that this belief is erroneous, that would require objective evidence that the problems are not a function of will power. But the issue of will power is simply the issue of free will. And the question of free will in nowhere near answered. To believe that people have free will and to consequently believe, then, that peoples' behaviors are, at least in part, the result of free will is neither accurate nor erroneous.


I understand that many in the therapeutic, psychiatric, political, etc. communities want us to believe that addiction is a medical condition like cancer, such that once we acquire it we can only be cured by paying someone with extensive skills to fix us. But it is not "true" to say that, nor is erroneous to say otherwise. It is an unanswered, and potentially unanswerable, question.

Gotta Have My Weedies

A friend/colleague of mine sent two article links this morning to a group of us. The first deals with an area of interest to my friend - increased organized crime violence in Mexico. The second, from the WSJ, which might seem completely unrelated, is summarized as follows:

The nation is in a fury over the missteps of public figures like Alex Rodriguez and Tom Daschle (and Michael Phelps). Joe Queenan on why focusing on human foibles is more therapeutic than getting mad at Wall Street -- and why everyone should lighten up.

As someone who frequently seems to see patterns where none exist (could it be schizophrenia…or the DaColbert Code ?), I see a connection between the articles: Michael Phelps.

Here’s where I’m seeing a connection. I quite agree with, for the most part, the author of the WSJ article. But I can’t get beyond his culturally-standard moral judgments, understood by Kohlberg for decades, based on the sadly simplistic “If it is illegal, it is wrong!” thinking. The author writes of Michael Phelps:

(He) violated an old-fashioned code of morality that we can all understand…(and) what (he) did is certainly wrong…

No doubt, what Phelps did was illegal. But on what grounds is it a “violation of a code or morality” and/or “certainly wrong”? Sure, I suppose what he did was immoral with the childlike decision that doing what is illegal is immoral and certainly wrong. Wouldn’t that mean, though, that what Rosa Parks did “violated a code of morality” and was thus “certainly wrong”? Anyone really want to defend that argument?

So how does this relate to the article on violence in Mexico? Well, just last week, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy released a report that begins:

Violence and the organized crime associated with the narcotics trade are critical problems in Latin America today. Confronted with a situation that is growing worse by the day, it is imperative to rectify the “war on drugs” strategy pursued in the region over the past 30 years.

Wow, an increase in organized crime and violence associated with drug prohibition. As an American, I find that really hard to believe! It would never happen here

Seriously, when eight college students get arrested because an Olympic athlete gets photographed smoking a bong, is it hard to imagine that pot smoking might become an underground activity with an organized crime system designed to help people get away with it?

Disclaimer: I’ve said many times that I’ve no interest in pot because I found my drug of choice at a very young age, and that drug is, thankfully, legal.