Addiction

The human mind has been sculpted over millennia to pursue rewarding and pleasurable experiences.

Addiction ensnares our mind's pleasure systems, replacing otherwise adaptive behaviors with a restless pursuit of reward.

Addictions can occur not only to psychoactive drugs such as alcohol, stimulants, opioids, and cannabis, but also to behaviors such as gambling, sex, exercise, video games, and social media.

Why are addictive behaviors so prevalent, and how can we treat them? What can we learn about our own minds, motivations, and desires by understanding the psychology of addiction? This course seeks to answer these questions by examining everyday, reward-seeking behaviors and their dopamine underpinnings that can become hijacked to form the basis of addictions.

We interrogate how addictive drugs and behaviors can change the brain over time, leading to compulsive habits and disorders of substance use and impulse control.

We inspect societal systems designed to capitalize on our brain's reward systems, resulting in monetary profit for some and challenging addictions for others.

We also discuss innovative treatments for addiction, including medications, controversial substances like cannabis and psychedelic drugs, and magnetic brain stimulation protocols.

Course content ranges from preclinical studies on brain mechanisms and behaviors of reward and reinforcement to clinical and public health studies on the factors leading to addiction from individual, community, economic, and sociopolitical perspectives.