The Society for Neuroscience Explains Addiction and Brain Circuits and How Brain Cells Use Chemicals to Communicate

by Lisa Frederiksen

The Society for Neuroscience provides a wonderful newsletter called  Brain Briefings . This newsletter series explains how basic neuroscience discoveries lead to clinical applications. Brain Briefings is published during the academic year and prepared for a lay audience.

They are excellent (and short) and explain the science in a way we can all understand. In this post, I am linking to their Briefing titled, ” Addiction and Brain Circuits .” To grab your interest, I’ve copied and pasted the opening to this particular Briefing below:

Humans have always struggled with addictions to mind-altering substances. Yet, only in the past few decades have neuroscientists begun to understand precisely how these substances affect the brain — and why they can quickly become a destructive and even deadly habit.

For a long time, society viewed addiction as a moral failing. The addict was seen as someone who simply lacked self-control. Today, thanks to new advances in brain imaging and other technologies, we know that addiction is a disease characterized by profound disruptions in particular routes — or circuits — in the brain.

Scientists are learning how genetics and environmental factors, such as stress, contribute to these neural disruptions and increase the risk of addiction. This ongoing research is allowing researchers to:

To read the rest of this Briefing, click here .

You may also find this Brain Briefing of interest as well:

Neurotransmitters: How Brain Cells Use Chemicals to Communicate | May

Whether it is learning a new fact or deciding which way to move, tasks executed by our brains rely on the smooth and efficient release of neurotransmitters, chemicals that send messages from one brain cell to another. Research has unlocked the molecular and cellular mysteries of this complex process — discoveries that one day may help treat some of the most severe and deadly diseases of the brain.