The Science of Addiction - Essay Example

I played several of the games on the web page and browsed through most of the informational pieces.  I did not watch any of the videos.  The games I played included "Make a Mad, Mad, Mad, Neuron," where you have to construct a neuron and label its pieces: "Mouse Party," which shows the effects of various types of drugs on the brains of mice and has pretty funny animations; and "Cerebral Commando," which was a game where you had to keep the brain releasing just the right amount of dopamine by recycling it and adding receptors.

This was interesting to me because it laid out pretty clearly exactly how reward pathways work and how a lot of stuff in the brain goes on.  The Beyond the Reward Pathway was interesting for the same reason, it explained how drugs do what they do.  Although I have seen plenty of movies or books where the characters are on drugs, and know some of the stereotypes about how people behave, it was really interesting to see the actual chemical reactions and problems that lead to that behavior.

            Beyond the Reward Pathway was the most educational, especially when coupled with the Mouse Party game.  Both of these taught me exactly how specific drugs cause specific behaviors in people, and the mouse party game made it come together well by showing the actual behaviors in the mouse you picked.  For instance, after playing the mouse game I learned that the reason cocaine makes its users so twitchy is because the drug causes problems in the part of the brain that deals with voluntary movements.  I also learned from the Reward Pathway article about the different types of pathways in the brain, such as the Dopamine, Tuberoinfundibular, and Nigrostriatal pathways, among others.  Each of these has different purposes and different effects on how the brain operates.

            Although the mad scientist game and the cerebral commando games were interesting, they each had their drawbacks.  The mad scientist game just took too long to start up.  There was too much boring information at the start which had nothing to do with anything and I couldn't skip it.  The commando game didn't teach me much and was kind of difficult to use.  The way it flashed was also annoying.  The game I enjoyed the most was the mouse party game, again.  It wasn't much of a "game" but I still enjoyed picking the mice based on their actions and then looking at the slides to see exactly how each of their actions was caused.

            It was also interesting to know why mice are used all the time in research and experiments.  For instance, the website says that mice have about 60% of the same genes as human beings, which seems strange.  However, this is why they make good test subjects.  For research about brain chemistry and drug reactions, mice are even more of a good fit because the brain is built in the same way, and even uses dopamine and other reward pathways in the same way.  I learned this from the "Mice are Good Model Organisms to Study Addiction" article.

            The reason so much of the website talked about Dopamine is that this is how a lot of drugs function.  They either, like cocaine, block the dopamine transporters or interact with the chemical in other ways.  Since Dopamine is how our brain registers pleasure, it plays an important role in how we become addicted to things.  When we feel good, we remember that and then want to feel good again.  So we become addicted because of the way drugs interact with dopamine.  Because the website is all about the science of addiction, it is natural that it would talk a lot about dopamine more than other parts of the brain's chemistry.  In addition to causing pleasure, dopamine affects a lot of parts of the brain.  This means that drugs that cause it to act in unnatural ways can also affect how our brain works over the long term.

            Other ways that drugs cause long-term change in our brains have to do with the neural pathways.  The main way that they do this is by damaging the glutinate and GABA systems, which are what the synapses in the brain use to communicate.  It's interesting to see that one of the drugs they mention on the website is caffeine, which most people probably do not think of as being a drug.  GABA makes synapses go, and glutinate makes them stop, as shown by the traffic light illustration on the website.  Since the pathway system is a finely tuned machine, when these two substances are changed, there will be bad results for the brain.  Over time, the synapse pathways may not recover between doses, meaning that the effects may be permanent.

The website lists several different ways this can happen involving addiction and drugs.  For instance, it mentions the use of marijuana as a medical drug instead of a recreational one and mentions that several states in the US allow this, but that more research is needed before it might become widely legal.  Studies in this area would also probably help influence social programs to stop more people becoming addicted, by helping with their family problems or improving the communities.