Training The Brain To Avoid Drug Addiction

Addiction to drugs and alcohol may seem to strike random people at random times. And of those people trying to kick their addictions, the success rate of rehabilitation seems random, too.

But new research from the Center for Addiction Research in Little Rock, Arkansas on the brain could provide a possible explanation how some people are more susceptible to substance abuse problems than others.

These findings could also provide a way for educators to better teach young people about the risks of drug and alcohol addiction.

Currently, schools educate students about the risks of addiction, mainly focusing on the long-term ill effects of substance abuse.

This works for some people, but not all. (Read consumer complaints about drug companies).

One reason education alone cannot prevent substance abuse is that people who are vulnerable to developing addictions tend to exhibit a trait called "delay discounting," which is the tendency to devalue rewards and punishments that occur in the future.

Delay discounting may be paralleled by "reward myopia," a tendency to opt for immediately rewarding stimuli, like drugs.

Thus, people vulnerable to substance abuse problems are those that opt for the immediately rewarding effects of drugs, despite knowing they’re harmful in the long run.

Delay discounting is a cognitive function that involves brain circuits including the frontal cortex. It builds upon working memory, the brain's "scratchpad", i.e., a system for temporarily storing and managing information reasoning to guide behavior.

Borrowed approach 

In a new article in Biological Psychiatry that studied this process, Dr. Warren Bickel and his colleagues used an approach borrowed from the rehabilitation of people who suffered a stroke or a traumatic brain injury.

The researchers had stimulant abusers repeatedly perform a working memory task, "exercising" their brains in a way that promoted the functional enhancement of the underlying cognitive circuits.

They found that this type of training improved working memory and also reduced their tendency to discount delayed rewards.

Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry said the health and legal ramifications associated with substance abuse is meaningless to the addict during the moment they’re considering whether or not to take their drug because “their mind is filled with the imagination of the pleasure to follow.”

"We now see evidence that this myopic view of immediate pleasures and delayed punishments is not a fixed feature of addiction. Perhaps cognitive training is one tool that clinicians may employ to end the hijacking of imagination by drugs of abuse," said Krystal.

Bickel agrees, adding "although this research will need to be replicated and extended, we hope that it will provide a new target for treatment and a new method to intervene on the problem of addiction."

The article is "Remember the Future: Working Memory Training Decreases Delay Discounting Among Stimulant Addicts" by Warren K. Bickel, Richard Yi, Reid D. Landes, Paul F. Hill, and Carole Baxter.

Bickel, Yi, and Hill are affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry, Center for Addiction Research, Little Rock, Arkansas.

Landes is with the Department of Biostatistics, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas. Baxter is from Recovery Centers of Arkansas, Little Rock, Arkansas.

The article appears in the February 2011 issue of Biological Psychiatry.