Dr. Keith Humphreys

What they actually mean is, you know, he's a person with different moods and that sort of thing.

Addiction is even more like that.

It's in common parlance.

People say, you know, I'm addicted to, you know, a TV show or I'm addicted to my phone or that sort of thing.

But, you know...

It's not just stuff you do a lot, you know, which we sometimes, you know, colloquially call addiction.

It's the persistence of doing something that is harmful.

So like the classic animal study, you know, is, you know, James's old study with rats done in the 50s.

showing that you could give a rat the opportunity to give itself brain stimulation which they enjoy and that they would continue to do that even as they were starving to death next to a pile of food pellets or run out of water while they were next to water.

That is what it was.

It's not the doing the things over and over or even being compulsive about things, it's doing them to the point of destruction.

When you would normally, you know, any other behavior, you would think, well, you would just stop doing that.

But people don't.

And that's the sine qua non of addiction.

Yeah, no, that is true.

So you see the other types of rewards, particularly natural rewards, start to fall away from the person's life.

So I'll sacrifice my relationship with my parents or my spouse or my friends.

I will stop going to work, which would normally generate the things I needed to eat, or I'll give up my housing for the sake of this substance.

And then you become not only more physically dependent on it, but essentially you're psychologically dependent on it because...

It's the one thing left that is still rewarding.