Understanding Addiction Part Two: Learning Addiction

Part Two of the Understanding Addiction series hosted by psychologist and neuroscientist Marc Lewis, and drug, policy, and intervention researcher and activist Shaun Shelly. 

In the second salon of the series, Marc presents his learning model of addiction, and co-host Shaun will support the discussion with some examples.

Marc unpacks the concept of addiction as learning, looking at habit formation as a developmental pathway with major and then increasingly minor branchings…how each “plateau” of adaptation acts as the foundation for the next branching in an ongoing developmental progression, which we call “cascading constraints”.

He will distinguish branchings based on endogenous factors (e.g., puberty/adolescence, illness) vs environmental events (e.g., changes in parenting, loss of partner or job, etc.) How is this progression underpinned by developmental timing (e.g., cognitive development —> emotion regulation capabilities, age-related social processes)? How do present habits/skills/trajectories become updated through social (and economic?) constraints and inputs?

Shaun will draw on his research and experiences in establishing services for people who use drugs to support Marc’s model.

Save the dates (parts 3&4):

April 18th, May 16th

1-4pm EST

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Suggested reading:

• Lewis, M. The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease. PublicAffairs(Perseus), New York, NY.
• Lewis, M. (2018). Brain change in addiction as learning, not disease. New England Journal of Medicine, 379, 1551–1560. DOI: 10.1056/nejmra1602872 https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/97270/1/NEJMra1602872.pdf
• Lewis, M., The addiction habit. Aeon, 14 December 2016

Suggested Viewing:

• Is addiction a brain disease? And does it matter? Browning Hoffman Memorial Lecture in Law and Psychiatry, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA, 15 March, 2018
• Addiction as learning: narrowing brains in narrowing environments. Lecture and webcast, University of Bergen, Sogndal, Norway, 4 September 2019

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