This program is brought to you by Emory University. [BLANK_AUDIO]. >> Hello, welcome to the first lecture in the course The Addicted Brain. My name is Dr. Michael Kuhar and I've been studying drugs and the brain for many years. A particular focus of my work has been drug addiction as it's a very interesting and important problem with its basis in brain function. Today, I'm going to give you an overview of the entire course. Obviously, we need to focus on the meaning of the word addiction. The name of the course is The Addictive Brain. What we mean by addiction is basic for us. By addiction, I refer to a repeated behavior that results in distress, personal distress, or has a negative impact on your life. An example is taking a drug such as methamphetamine repeatedly, to where you feel compelled to continue to take the drug repeatedly, even though it's having a negative impact. The negative impact could be the loss of a job or financial stresses or health problems. In many people's view, the negative impact is a key feature of addiction. Now, it's obvious that not every repetitive activity has a negative impact on your life. For example, appropriate eating is a repetitive activity that we can't do without. And it does not under normal circumstances have a negative impact. In fact, it's the opposite. It has a positive impact. There are some other things that occur with addicting behavior. For example, someone may have tried to stop behavior many times but failed. They may have tried to increase the frequency of the behavior or the dose of the drug to get the same effect. And they may find that when they've stopped the behavior or drug, they begin to feel bad, and they go into a withdrawal state, such that they go back to taking the drug to avoid the pain of withdrawal. There's other terms that we need to talk about. We're going to use the word abuse. Someone can be a drug addict or drug abuser. The word addict implies a more serious problem than the word abuser. Sometimes I'll use them fairly interchangeably because the general idea of taking drugs is the same, but there is a difference in the degree of seriousness. Also, in this course, I'm going to use the word drug to refer to an addictive substance. And the word medicine to refer to a curative and helpful substance such as an antibiotic or an antidepressant. Sometimes a substance can be both a drug and a medicine. For example, amphetamine can be used as a medicine to treat ADHD or as an abused and addictive drug. The drugs that are addicting, and now we know what we mean by the word addicting, include alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, certain prescription drugs, methamphetamine, cocaine and others. In this course, we will be talking about all of the various substances that are abused. And we'll find out how they're different, and how they're alike. Because drugs are so dangerous, to study them we need to use animals in research. Without the availability and proper use of animals we could not have learned as much as we know about drugs, nor would we have discovered the medications that we have for addicts. We've been able to understand the process of addiction, and we've been able to learn a great many things about this disorder. I'll also be talking about how drugs affect the brain. This includes the process of the brain adapting to the repeated battering of the brain by drugs. Yes, I use the word battering because the brain is truly assaulted by these substances, and I'll explain how and why that happens. I'm also going to talk about what happens at the cellular level in the brain, what happens to the individual nerve cells during the process of addiction. You'll hear the word neuroplasticity, which basically is a change in a neural pathway. And this change is the basis of some change in behaviour. Simple learning is an example of neuroplasticity, as is addiction. We all know that addiction is long-lasting. It can take people a long time to wean themselves away from taking drugs. We're going to look at the long-lasting effects of drugs through brain imaging, and through behavioral studies. An awareness of the fact that addiction is long-lasting is very critical to how we consider treating drug addiction. We'll talk about that. Another factor is vulnerability. This addresses who will be an addict. Will I be an addict? Would you be an addict? How do we figure that out? If you look at large populations of addicts and compare them to large populations of non addicts, you can see that the addicts have some personal characteristics and environmental factors that are different. We'll talk about these. Of course, if you're having trouble with drugs or other addictions, it's highly recommended that you go into treatment. While some people can walk away from drugs very easily, others don't. And we don't know why. Some people need treatment to stay away from drugs. The important thing to know is that treatment does work. Get the right treatment and it's going to help. Finally, we'll talk about government policies and the law and how it affects drug users. This is a very interesting issue and it's impact on society is not minor. In summary, this course is very broad; it covers a a lot of material. We're going to go from the molecules themselves, all the way to government policy. I know you're going to enjoy this, and learn a great deal. And I look forward to working with you. [BLANK_AUDIO]
