Continuity of Pleasure and Brain Damage

This article is aimed to help you understand how continuity of pleasure and brain damage are linked together. They both are not separate and pleasure in itself not harmful but the issue lies in its continuity. To understand the whole process step by step in a precise way lets start with a quick background.

What is pleasure to brain ?

The brain registers all pleasures in the same way, whether they initiate with a psychotropic drug, a monetary reward or a praise, a sexual encounter, or a satisfying meal. You can observe for yourself if you are attentive that brain registers the pleasure using the thought and thus provide it continuity in form of memory. Lets have some scientific background as provided in the section below.

How brain react to pleasure ?

In the brain, pleasure has a distinct touch: the release of the neurotransmitter (A neurochemical that transmits nerve impulses across a synapse) dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, a cluster of nerve cells lying underneath the cerebral cortex.

Hence there is the likelihood that the use of a drug or participation in a rewarding activity will lead to addiction is directly linked to the speed with which it promotes dopamine release, the intensity of that release, and the reliability of that release.

Smoking a drug or injecting it intravenously, as opposed to swallowing it as a pill, for example, generally produces a faster, stronger dopamine signal and is more likely to lead to drug misuse.

Dopamine not only contributes to the experience of pleasure, but also plays a role in learning and memory—two key elements in the transition from liking something to becoming addicted to it.

The hippocampus lays down memories of this rapid sense of satisfaction, and the amygdala creates a conditioned response to certain stimuli.

Brains Reward Center

Repeated exposure to an addictive substance or behavior causes nerve cells in the nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex (the area of the brain involved in planning and executing tasks) to communicate in a way that couples liking something with wanting it, in turn driving us to go after it. That is, this process motivates us to take action to seek out the source of pleasure.

So, We have seen that there is continuity of pleasure is linked with the registration of pleasure into memory. Now, We will see how this continuity of pleasure causes brain damage in the following section.

How continuity of pleasure and brain damage are linked together ?

Addiction turns into slavery thus by corrupting other normal drives such as learning due to development of tolerance and compulsion:

• Over time, the brain adapts in a way that actually makes the sought-after substance or activity less pleasurable as in a person who becomes addicted, brain receptors become overwhelmed. The brain responds by producing less dopamine or eliminating dopamine receptors—an adaptation similar to turning the volume down on a loudspeaker when noise becomes too loud.

• Although this effect is much more for artificial pleasure as compared to natural ones as a result, People who develop an addiction typically find that, in time, the desired substance no longer gives them as much pleasure. They have to take more of it to obtain the same dopamine “high” because their brains have adapted due to an effect known as tolerance.

• At this point, compulsion takes over. The pleasure associated with an addictive drug or behavior subsides—and yet the memory of the desired effect and the need to recreate it (the wanting) persists. This memory seeks continuity.

What is the logical conclusion out of this understanding ?

1. Acknowledging the problem is the first step toward recovery. Understand that your problems usually are transient, and perhaps most importantly, acknowledge that life is not always supposed to be pleasurable.
2. All the entertainment industry, advertisers and marketer are trying to take advantage, in which they themself are struck, of this desire in human beings for continuity to pleasure registered by thought to brain.
3. There is a responsibility that comes out of this understanding to aid others as most of them are addicted and thus slaves to their habits which is destroying their freedom and causing mental problems.

References and Further reading :

1). http://www.helpguide.org/harvard/how-addiction-hijacks-the-brain.htm

2). http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/07/hardcore-pot-smoking-could-damage-brains-pleasure-ce