Junkies, Adrenaline Junkies, and Pleasure

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Junkies, Adrenaline Junkies, and Pleasure

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Why cant I tickle myself?

• Sarah-Jayne Blackmore (Univ. of London) believed
  you cant tickle yourself because you know
  exactly when and where youre going to be
  tickled.
• She devised a tickling machine that would respond
  in various ways when the participants themselves
  would activate it.
• Discovered that a person is only tickled when
  there is at least a three-tenths of a second or
  more delay when he activates the machine.
• Also discovered that a person is only tickled if
  the tickle machine moves at least 90 degrees in a
  different direction than the direction chosen by
  the participant.

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Why cant I tickle myself?

• Her hypothesis was confirmed being tickled
  doesnt feel ticklish until there is an element
  of unpredictability and lack of control.
• But, I thought those were bad things, professor!
• Yet, most of us like being tickled by the right
  person.
• If psychological stress is caused by
  unpredictability and lack of control, why is
  being tickled not a psychologically stressful
  experience?
• The answer is if you get allostatically
  challenged in just the right way, it can feel
  great.

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The Neurochemistry of Pleasure

• The key neurotransmitter to pleasure is dopamine.
• A monkey is trained that when a bell rings, he
  presses a lever ten times, and then gets a
  reward. (Wolfram Shultz, Univ. of Fribourg)
• When is the biggest release of dopamine?
• After the sound of the bell, before the task
  commences.
• The real pleasure inherent in the task is not the
  reward but the anticipation of the reward.

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The Neurochemistry of Pleasure

• Dopamine and sense of anticipation actually fuels
  the work needed to attain the reward.
• Paul Phillips (Univ. of N. Carolina) designed a
  technique that artificially simulated bursts of
  dopamine in rats.
• Sure enough, when dopamine was supplied, the rats
  began lever pressing like crazy.
• When rats were trained under these circumstances,
  the scientists could gradually extend the amount
  of time between stimulus and reward, and the rats
  would keep pressing the lever.
• This is the core of gratification postponement.

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The Neurochemistry of Pleasure

• Schultz also went on to discover that when reward
  schedule is replaced with intermittent reward
  schedule, amounts of natural dopamine released
  increased greatly.
• In a generally benevolent setting, and with a
  certain element of surprise, the pleasure
  response was heightened.

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Stress and Reward

• Why does a lack of control and predictability
  fuel dopamine release?
• The key seems to be whether the uncertainty
  occurs in a benign or malevolent context.
• If its the right person tickling you, maybe,
  just maybe the tickling is going to be followed
  by something really good, like hand holding.
• However, if Slobodan Milosovic is tickling you,
  maybe, just maybe, it is going to be followed by
  his trying to ethnically cleanse you.

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Stress and Reward

• What makes for benign sort of environment in
  which uncertainty is pleasurable, rather than
  stressful?
• How long the experience goes on (riding a roller
  coaster for three minutesor three weeks?)
• If it is bound in a larger package of control and
  predictability (scary movies, bungee jumping with
  licensed professionals)

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Stress and Reward

• Strangely, glucocorticoids will actually
  stimulate dopamine release solely in the pleasure
  pathway in the brain.
• What is the pattern of GC exposure that maximizes
  dopamine release? You guessed it
• A moderate rise that doesnt go on for too long.
• GCs also activate SNS, enhancing glucose and
  oxygen delivery to the brain.
• You feel focused, alert, alive, motivated, and
  anticipatory. We call this transient stress
  stimulation.

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Adrenaline Junkies

• What does this tell us about the small group of
  people who feel most alive under excessively
  stressful circumstances?
• There are several theories, but the most widely
  regarded is as such
• After a pleasurable experience, dopamine levels
  generally go back to baseline. But when some
  people experience pleasure, their brains dont
  keep up with the dopamine reserves in the
  pleasure pathway. As a result, dopamine levels
  seem to drop down to below baseline. As a result,
  after a pleasurable experience, these people feel
  dysphoric.

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Adrenaline Junkies

• In order to attain the same dopamine peak, next
  time the pleasurable experience must be even
  riskier and more thrilling.
• Afterwards, baseline drops down even lower than
  before.
• This necessitates another stimulant, and another,
  in a vicious cycle.
• This is the essence of the downward spiral of
  addiction.

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Addiction

• Research from the National Institutes of Health
  and the National Institute on Drug Abuse has
  shown that drug abusers and adrenaline junkies
  (sometimes called sensation seekers) have
  similar internal motivations.
• The brain reward system is similar in both,
  indicating that those who enjoy risk taking are
  more likely to indulge in drug abuse than those
  who are not high sensation seekers.
• Rats raised to seek novelty are more sensitive to
  the acute rewarding effects of amphetamines than
  rats raised not to seek novelty.

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Addiction

• Amphetamines are one of many ruinously addicting
  drugs available throughout the world, including
  cocaine, crack, heroin, opium, etc.
• All work by supplying dopamine to the
  tegmentum-nucleus accumbens (or pleasure
  pathway), similar to the effects shown in
  sensation seekers.
• The mechanism of addiction is the activation and
  high reactivation potential of the neural
  pathways that cause a person to find a particular
  drug pleasurable.
• This makes sense you anticipate how pleasurable
  it will be and come back for more.

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Addiction

• Just as with sensation seekers, habitual use of
  these drugs causes a greater need each time to
  fuel the same dopamine peaks.
• In rats, sexual activity and food raise dopamine
  levels 50 to 100 percent. Cocaine raises dopamine
  levels 1000 percent!
• If you flood the brain with dopamine, the brain
  responds by becoming less sensitive.
• At a certain point, drug use becomes not about
  wanting the drug, but needing it just to maintain
  normal dopamine levels.
• This is addiction at its worst.

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Addiction

• This is compounded by something called
  context-dependent craving.
• Particular persons, places, or situations
  associated with use of the drug will produce
  strong cravings for it, even years later after a
  person has been sober for an extended period of
  time.
• Unfortunately, potential for context-dependent
  relapse does not seem to decrease with time in
  most cases.

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Stress and Substance Abuse

• Have you even had too much to drink and fallen
  down, and gotten back up thinking Ah, that
  didnt hurt only to find dried blood streaked
  down your leg the next morning?
• Put a rat in a cage with dark corners and a food
  dish under a bright light. Under the influence of
  alcohol, the rat takes much less time to leave
  the safe confines of the corners and venture to
  the dish.
• Alcohol, like many other drugs, dulls physical
  and psychological pain.
• Alcohol and other drugs are considered to be
  anxiolytics they lyse or disintegrate anxiety.

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Stress and Substance Abuse

• Adolescents who describe their family lives as
  troubled and who are alienated from family are
  more frequent users and abusers of drugs.
• Marital discord is also related to substance
  abuse, as well as physical and sexual abuse.
• In short, people who are surrounded by stressful
  circumstances are more likely to seek substance
  abuse as a way to temporarily relieve anxiety.
• Why? As Sapolsky so delicately puts if youre
  in such a mess of an altered state that you can
  barely remember what species you are, you may not
  pick up on the subtle fact that something
  stressful is occurring.

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Stress and Substance Abuse

• As the effects of the drug wear off, reality
  sneaks back in and as a result, still under the
  influence and faced with what you can at this
  point perceive to be malevolent stress, the
  effect of the drug reverses and becomes anxiety
  generating.
• The only solution to this problem is to drink,
  ingest, inhale, shoot up, and snort all over
  again.
• Importantly, stress increases the already
  addictive potential of a drug if the stressor
  comes right before the drug exposure.
• Dopamine levels fueled by short term stress
  coupled with the effects of drugs creates an
  addicting experience and reinforces drug use when
  stressed.

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The Realm of Synthetic Pleasure

• So drug addiction broadly serves two dissociable
  functions a positive affect (drugs generate
  pleasure) and a negative affect (drugs can be
  used to self-medicate pain, stress, fear, etc.).
• Society in general however, seems to predispose
  certain groups of people to drugs use by an
  uneven distribution of healthy opportunities for
  pleasure or sources of fear and anxiety.
• It is hard to just say no when life demands a
  constant vigilance and when there are few other
  things to which to say yes.

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The Realm of Synthetic Pleasure

• A study showed that people who live in a lower
  socioeconomic status and as a result tend to be
  less educated, products of more violent
  surroundings, and victims of societal prejudices
  have a higher sense of disorder and unfairness in
  society and a lower sense of hope for the future.
• There was discovered to be a linear relationship
  between these factors and alcohol, tobacco, and
  marijuana use for these individuals.

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The Realm of Synthetic Addiction

• More broadly, the evolution of society in terms
  of processed products available for consumption
  as opposed to the now simple pleasures of more
  primitive times have narrowed and artificially
  strengthened our sources of pleasure.
• This idea is centered around the fact that our
  anticipatory pleasure pathway is stimulated by
  many different things.
• For this to work, the pathway must rapidly
  habituate and desensitize to any given source
  that has stimulated it so that it is ready to
  respond to the next stimulant.

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The Realm of Synthetic Pleasure

• Unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic
  experience and sensation and pleasure evoke
  unnaturally strong degrees of habituation.
• Consider the study by Phillip Brickman
  (Northwestern Univ.) lottery winners were
  interviewed several months after their big win.
  Months after this huge pleasurable event, most
  reported mild feelings of dysphoria and a
  dissatisfaction with events that used to please
  them, but now consider mundane.
• Strong synthetic pleasure experiences strong
  degree of habituation to natural pleasurable
  experience
• A lot like sensation seekers and drug abusers.

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The Realm of Synthetic Addiction

• This has two consequences soon, we hardly notice
  the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by such
  things as the leaves in autumn, or the lingering
  glance of the right person.
• The other consequence is that, after awhile, we
  even habituate to those artificial deluges of
  intensity and moment-ness.
• Now isnt as good as it used to be, and wont
  suffice tomorrow.

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References

• Brickman, Phillip. Coates, Dan. Janoff-Bulman,
  Ronnie. Lottery Winners and Accident Victims Is
  Happiness Relative? Journal of Personality and
  Social Psychology. Vol. 36 (8). 1978, pp. 917
  927
• Kaplan, Paul S. Adolescence. Houghton Mifflin
  Company. Boston, Mass, 2004.
• Sapolsky, Robert M. Why Zebras Dont Get Ulcers.
  Third Edition. Henry Holt and Company. New York,
  2004.
• Wilson, Nance. Syme, S Leonard. Boyce, W Thomas.
  Battistich, Victor A. Selvin, Steve. Adolescent
  Alcohol, Tobacco, and Marijuana Use The
  Influence of Neighborhood Disorder and Hope.
  American Journal of Health Promotion. Vol. 20
  (1). 2005, pp. 11 19
• Social Impact Productions. Adrenaline Junkies.
  http//www.mainstreetheartbeat.org/rewind/fear/rel
  ated/aj.htm. 2002. Par. 2.