Tonight, we take a break from the grinding angst to talk about brain science.

This starts with a story. Once upon a time, there was a sweet, kind, pious, very conservative woman with Parkinson’s Disease. (I know doctors don’t think this way, but I would not want a disease named after me. Then people will be cursing your name every time someone gets it!)

Her Parkinson’s was quite severe, and nothing seemed to help much until her doctor put her on a drug called Elect (citation needed) that was very good at keeping her symptoms under control.

But then one day, she was passing a casino and felt the strange urge to go in. This is a woman who was raised to think that gambling was a sin, and yet she went into the casino, put a quarter into a slot machine, and was instantly hooked.

And when I say hooked, I mean she quickly spiraled into a full blown gambling addict. She estimates she blew through around $300,000 total, a quarter at a time. She stole from friends, lied to people, stole away from family events to go gamble, and did all the other things that a desperate addict does when the addiction has hollowed them out and all they care about is the next fix. The addiction becomes more important than family, morality, religion, you name it. Everything in the addict’s life is twisted to serve the addiction.

That is part of what makes addiction so devastating. It brings a kind of deadly simplicity to life. It is like being devoted to a very demanding but rewarding religion. The addiction is your god, and all you have to do to be happy is to serve it. No more life decisions, no more searching for meaning, no more wondering what to do with yourself, no more pesky complicated freedom.

Life becomes so very, very simple. I can well imagine how hard it would be to break away from that.

Anyhow, our protagonist hit rock bottom and was quite miserable. She hated herself for what she had become. She was in the same pickle as an addicted. And she kept saying that it was as though she couldn’t help herself.

Her saviour arrived in an unusual form : a new drug that, instead of suppressing the symptoms, acted like the missing dopamine from the woman’s brain.

See, Parkinson’s burns out certain dopamine secreting cells in the brain, and so one way of treating it is by giving the patient a dopamine boost via medication and thus correcting the low dopamine level that causes.

That is, incidentally, what Doctor Oliver Sacks, as played by Robin Williams, was trying to do in Awakenings.

And so what happened when our poor protagonist switched to the new drug?

Her desire to gamble evaporated. Gone like it had never been there in the first place. She went from hardcore addict at the end of her rope to stone cold sober and sane and all it took was a medication swap.

What was happening in the lady’s brain was that her brain had someone figured out that the gambler’s rush, otherwise known as the dopamine release we get from gambling, was just the thing to bring her dopamine levels back up to normal.

All that gambling was, like all addiction, just a form of self-medication. When our dopamine levels are too low, the brain switches into a kind of emergency mode and forces us to focus only on correcting it. And that was fine in the state of nature, because the only way we could get that kick would be to go do something biologically advantageous, like eat, or hunt, or have sex, or even take a bath in the river.

Our instincts matched out environment and while I am sure that system still broke down sometimes, by and large, following our instincts reliably led to both the things we needed to do to survive and propagate the species and the dopamine release needed to keep us on an even keel.

Then we had to go and invent civilization, and with that came the leisure time to focus in on maximizing the reward we got from all our favorite things. We invented cooking and made our food more rewarding. We got really good at hunting, and made that both more rewarding and more successful. We invented all kinds of new ways to have sex and make that more fun too.

And we found that certain plants could give that reward center of the brain a right good kick, and so we could get that dopamine high without having to do anything.

That, presumably, was the birth of addiction as we know it today. When the basic things become extremely rewarding, our brains naively rewires itself around this wonderful new source of reward.

Which would make sense in the wild. But not in town.

So maybe one primitive ancestor ended up addicted to eating and became the first fat person (remember, every fat person is a food addict). Another got really into the hunting and became a wild man who disappeared into the forest and never returned. A third never, ever wanted to leave the sex cave and was always “on the make” like a modern sex addict.

And others were content to just sit around chewing the lotus leaf all day. It’s a wonder our species survived.

The more I look at this issue, the more convinced I become that dopamine is not simply A reward, it is THE reward. Everything we find enjoyable is just another way to get our brains to release that sweet, sweet dopamine. From the next fix of a hardcore junkie to the simple pleasure one takes in one’s morning tea, it is all about the dopamine.

It’s an alienating but also liberating thought : every action taken by every human being who has ever lived was just one more try to get the same chemical out of our stingy brains.

That’s all from me for now, folks! Seeya tomorrow.