Marc Lewis - Addiction as Learning
Marc Lewis - Addiction as Learning
How to integrate addiction into our social fabric
Apple Podcasts:
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Marc Lewis is a professor, neuroscientist, author, and therapist whose own personal struggle with opiate addiction continues to inform his groundbreaking work in the field.
In this wide-ranging discussion, Marc explains how addiction isn't actually a disease, but rather a highly motivated form learning--and how this understanding accounts for the ways in which people ultimately overcome addiction: often spontaneously and without external treatment.
To find out more about Marc's work, check out his website or buy one of his books (I highly recommend them!)
Other Topics include:
Why Marc Lewis believes the “disease model” of addiction should be challenged
Why the brain changes in addiction resembles the brain changes in other issues, like binge eating, porn, and internet addiction
How the progress of addiction differs from that of a disease
Reconsidering if “hijacking the brain” is useful metaphor for the addicted brain
Depression as a strategy of self-regulation
The feedback cycle of addiction and the relief of “Now appeal”
Comparing an addicted brain to a brain in love
Lisa Diamond: Research on Pair bonding
How desire, not drugs themselves, “hijack the brain”
Why addictions happen “despite the bad news they bring into a person’s life”
Marc reflects on a recent career change to Clinical Psychology
How can we meaningfully intervene into a person’s reward system?
Internal Family Systems approach
Is the brain like a morality play?
James talks Morning Pages as a loose therapeutic space
Freud and the importance of putting things into words
Marc reflects on his journals of addiction
James Pennebaker - writing to heal (article)
why it’s so hard to predict when addicts quit
Edward Slingerland - Drunk
weighing the social effects vs the physical effects of alcohol
Carl Hart - Drug Use for Grown-Ups
fentanyl and the mixing with stimulants
Why Marc Lewis think drugs will be integrated into society in future policy
Research into psychedlics, therapy, microdosing
Why you have to have done drugs to understand drugs
Terance McKenna “when you get the message hang up the phone”
How Marc Lewis’ addiction experience became an asset in his career
why the “Streets are Talented”
if we forget the social, we are missing the whole picture