Drugs or Behaviours: What Do We Call These Things?
It’s kind of hard to come to terms with the words we need to use because all of the words already have a meaning to people. For instance, it makes no sense to call gambling a drug because it’s obviously a behaviour. To call taking cocaine a behaviour is confusing because it mixes up the drug with the action of taking it. So we need to come up with a word that means, in essence, stuff that releases dopamine. Science already has a term for that in behavioural psychology. The word is “reinforcer.” Reinforcer doesn’t really do it for me, but if you like that word for what we’re talking about, I can live with it. My problem is that for behavioural scientists it brings up the idea that the person is normal and that no illness exists. The word I like better is “reward.” A reward causes dopamine to be released in the reward center of the brain. It doesn’t tell us if the reward comes from outside or inside, and it doesn’t tell us if the person is ill or well. It’s just a reward.
Now, we can see that if people have normal reward systems and get normal reward from normal life, there is no need for other external reward inputs. However, if someone doesn’t have a normal reward system and needs a specific behaviour or drug to feel normal reward, then we will see their focus concentrate on that useful reward.
It might be helpful to know what sort of things give us a reward signal. For people with addiction these things can become compulsive. These include alcohol and drugs, of course, including nicotine. As well there is food and sex. Interestingly, novel stimuli also work and that would include 30 new images every second like TV or a video game. While I believe addiction is a single disease, people point out to me all the time the differences between addicts such as cocaine addicts and compulsive overeaters: “You don’t see people grinding up hamburger and injecting it,” they say with a smile to tell me how wrong I am. The difference is that different drugs and behaviours effect the reward system through different mechanisms. For instance, cocaine works directly in the MFB to block the reuptake of dopamine (it blocks the vacuum cleaner raising the dopamine level) while food works through several different sensory mechanisms to release dopamine.
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