Intellectual pursuits may buffer the brain against addiction | Hacker News Reader

Intellectual pursuits may buffer the brain against addiction

news.berkeley.edu

159 pointscurrysausage56 comments

This just sounds like a rehashing of the famous Rat Park experiments, where happy rats in a good (from a rat's perspective) environment refused morphine, but rats in traditional cages guzzled it. It seems like putting rats through little rat challenges would be stimulating and result in happier rats as well.

I think it's a stretch to say that intellectual activities buffer against addiction. I think the simpler explanation here is just that happiness buffers against addiction, which is not as linkbaity since it is common wisdom in recovery circles and has already been shown in other, more famous experiments.

I did degrees in computer science and pure mathematics, had all sorts of nerdy "intellectual" pursuits and still wound up addicted to alcohol, partly because I was deeply depressed and unhappy with who I was. Anecdotal, true, but I offer it as counterpoint to the handful of "I do nerdy stuff and am not an addict, ergo this article must be correct" comments in here.

The majority of the serious addicts I have known have been intelligent emotionally sensitive people and many of them kept themselves busy. The common factor between them all has been management of severe emotional pain.

I'd imagine a blanket statement about what works for everyone is misguided, yeah. "If you have intellectual pursuits, that will prevent addiction" obviously can't be stated as a fact. I'd imagine it's much more complex and maybe contingent on various factors, like how individuals calculate self-worth and what types of emotional or life experiences folks feel they are lacking on a day-to-day basis. Or something along those lines.

But I have read research that shows there are some signs of predisposition towards drugs. Assuming those studies were thorough, then that's probably also a component. I guess the next step is repeating and then teasing out how important certain factors are when it comes to prevention / prediction.

This jives with my experience using pretty much everything, including heroin. A high-level unscientific explanation I've had is basically folks prone to addiction feel like heroin or whatever replaces the feelings of success and companionship etc. I made it most of the way through college being an occasional user and passed up opportunity's to get shit because I was focused on a project or had hope of something happening that was exciting in the short term. This is probably a-typical. A lot of guys I knew are dead or fell in without much of an interest in other things. Like they had poor prospects in life.

The government should set up free bupenorpine centers. This generic drug should be made easily available to addicts. I am so tired of hearing about heroin death stories. We can debate what's the best treatment, or why people do drugs. The government should pay doctors to administer this drug to addicts. A years supply? If it's lost, or stolen they will be forced to go to treatment centers? Oh, yea--one more time; the drug should be offered free of charge, and addicts shouldn't have to jump through hoops in order to get it. You can get the dose down to 1-2 mg/day without feeling much discomfort. (Right now the government makes doctors take a class in order to prescribe it. Doctor's can only gave 100 patients. Most Doctors--will drag the patient in for office visits--why? For money of course? Plus, they are ticked off they needed to take that reduculios class on this drug.(I can't imagine, even the D- graduate, having a hard time grasping the mechanism, and dosage of this drug? It's just not a complicated drug? Especially in small dosages?

Sorry, about the rant; just tired if hearing about deaths from heroin! Especially, when I know their are addicts that want help.

Pretty sure the economics work out in societys favor when it comes to H maintenance and those safe injection places, too.

I agree completely that there should be free and easily accessible addiction treatment centers available to those who need it.

I just don't think buprenorphine is the solution.

It's easily abusable and worth relatively a lot on the black market.

You run into the same problem you did with methadone: you're on an opioid that has a 16-27 day half-life. You will be withdrawing heavily for much longer than you would if you cold turkeyed a street opioid.

You're replacing one opioid with another, one addiction with another. This is 100% anecdotal, but I only know people who have had months and years of abject misery trying to come off of buprenorphine.

For hardcore opioid addiction, it might make sense. But there are options like the Naltrexone injection that doesn't involve replacement therapy.

Naltrexone implants are worse than bupe. Sure, you can't use, but your addiction is still there. None of the current solutions are perfect, but the implants are by far one of the worst in my opinion. Bupe worked extremely well for me, it allowed me to stop using heroin and get my professional life back in order, without the spectre of where my next fix (and the $300 for it) was coming from. Tapering bupe was easy for me, and jumping off at 0.4mg was easy enough that I merely took two weeks off work.

My government has. It's why I'm clean, have been for 3 years after 6 years of heroin addiction. I agree, and I can't believe the costs involved in bupe treatment in the U.S.

> This jives with my experience using pretty much everything, including heroin. A high-level unscientific explanation I've had is basically folks prone to addiction feel like heroin or whatever replaces the feelings of success and companionship etc.

This. If I am on stimulating projects and am spending time with my friends regularly, I never drink to excess because it would interfere with my ability to be productive. When I am stuck on bullshit work and don't get to see my friends, I drink some on weekdays and hard on weekends alone because I am bored and looking for cheap short term happiness.

I'm also reminded of an interview with an actor who said that cocaine didn't add much to his life, since he'd get the same rush from walking onstage each night, without having to spend $100 before or suffer a crash after.

I am coming to the conclusion that addiction is in significant part a symptom rather than a cause.

In my own case, I am not "addicted" in the traditional sense, but following some adverse health events that have not been resolved, I have become more more habituated to using TV and "the Internet" to "tune out". When you are in chronic physical discomfort, it is easy to fall into doing whatever is most convenient and immediately effective to take your attention away from this.

I also ended up in some terribly noisy work and home circumstances (yes, both). This is another stress that one can seek to escape, especially when it is chronic.

And, said stress, as also the physical discomfort described above, severely throttles cognitive ability, in my experience.

TL;DR: It's a slippery slope. Avoid health and environmental issues, before they become chronic, self-reinforcing problems that may lead to behavior that has traditionally been defined as the source problem.

Maybe it's because intellectual pursuits are themselves an addiction all their own?

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-06/uosc-fk062006...

That would make sense for me: I see no fundamental difference in the "high" I get when solving math problems and the "high" I get when conquering a hard game.

The difference between what we call addictive and the rest (e.g. sports vs drugs) imo is the impact on your health and your long term ability/disposition to perform other activities: intellectual pursuit can propel your career, improve your ability to solve problems, and directly reward you monetarily. If drugs had this side effect they wouldn't be labelled as such.

I agree completely, I get a huge high from solving interesting programming problems or engineering problems. I think it is why so many engineers and programmers will work on open source projects, not just the love of the technology but the fun of solving cool problems, it is addictive in it's own way (but I think far less harmful than other types of addictions related to chemicals or other unhealthy things). But all things in moderation I suppose.

Sometimes when I'm programming a really interesting problem (no the regular nodejs/express crap) I literally become wired.

Where on your body is your USB interface located?

Not sure why you are being downvoted. Maybe the jab at node etc. but this is quite similar to what the op alludes to. The engagement; the need to solve the problem can have quite intense experiencial results--along the lines of chemical intradiction in other circumstances.

This statement is a sign of intellectual naiveté. An addiction to intellectual pursuits does not offer the same high as injecting yourself with heroin. The sense and intensity of euphoria are dramatically different.

The nature of the addiction is also different. Being addicted to a drug is entirely different from being addicted to doing math. You don't get the shakes, or feel intense pain or suffer from withdrawal when you don't do math for a couple months.

This article only offers intellectual stimulus as potential treatment for addiction, not a drug replacement. Are people really so smug as to delude themselves into thinking that they're of the nature that solving a math problem is like doing a line of coke? Lets be real.

A fair point, but I was being more specific. I meant if you even look at the active principles of most drugs, they stimulate hormonal responses and perhaps directly things we call "satisfying". So it's not a question of naiveness or not, it's the technical question on what distinguishes satisfaction generated by a drug, by a sport or by intellectual pursuit. For example, sports practice directly releases endorphins, which as the name says, is an endogenous morphin.

If they can't be fundamentally distinguished from a stimulatory point of view (my hypothesis), I'd say what distinguishes a drug to some activity we don't regard as addictive is simply that one is sustainable, leads to long term benefits while the other is unsustainable.

You're misunderstanding the magnitude of difference that exogenous opioids have to endorphins. They're on a completely different level, and comparing them is futile other than in the abstract.

I once met a guy who encountered major emotional pain when his wife left him, and had to go to therapy because of a running addiction. It was also causing physical health problems like purple swollen feet. Anything can be addictive "compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, despite adverse consequences" is the definition. Lots of people have used drugs to propel their career and avoided addiction. For example, Steve Jobs said taking LSD was one of the most important things he had ever done in his life.... Although I've never heard of an LSD addiction, there's lots of profound people who used cannabis habitually.

Fun fact: cocaine is technically legal in the United States for medicinal and, apparently, research purposes. There is a single US company licensed to import coca leaves: the Stepan Company, which extracts extremely pure cocaine from the coca leaves, sells the spent leaves to the Coca-Cola Company (which uses them as an ingredient) and the cocaine to Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, which is presumably where UC Berkeley sourced the cocaine for this experiment.

They probably sourced it from Sigma Aldrich, although I'm not sure who Sigma uses as a supplier.

Cocaine is semi-routinely used for dental and sinus surgery in Australia. My mother had cocaine used in her sinus surgery only 8 years ago.

One possible case in point, the mathematician's mathematician Paul Erdős, who was said to be a heavy methamphetamine user. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s :

   After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the 
   concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him 
   $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a 
   month.[18] Erdős won the bet, but complained that during 
   his abstinence, mathematics had been set back by a 
   month.

Amphetamine and methamphetamine is not the same drug.

True, but I'm assuming he was on Desoxyn, as opposed to some low-grade diet pills.

Paul Hoffman's biography of Erdos :

"Erdös first did mathematics at the age of three, but for the last twenty-five years of his life, since the death of his mother, he put in nineteen-hour days, keeping himself fortified with 10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso, and caffeine tablets. "[0]

[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-man.html

10-20 mg of Ritalin isn't that much. The average adult with ADHD takes 20-30 mg.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC181133/

I think what Erdos did is almost the opposite. I say this as someone who has thoroughly explored both extremes. Intellectual pursuits provide intelligent people with the stimulus they need. When they are bored, in particular when they are prevented from pursuing their intellectual activities, some drugs offer a way to squash the desperate need for stimulus. However, when there are no restrictions, some other drugs provide the opportunity to push your intellect to its limits, eschewing, temporarily, the need for sleep, sustenance or distraction, to focus on the intellectual task at hand. Very broadly speaking, depressants fulfil the first need and stimulants fulfil the second.

I can say after much exploration that the un-stimulated brain is much more interesting in the medium and long term than the (chemically) stimulated brain. But I don't know anything better than depressants for seeing you through those times when you can't think or work freely.

"It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the Juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion."

Compairing Erdos with other Mathematicians is a really bad idea. I believe he would have been an outlier without drugs. Its like comparing Lance Armstrong with other racers.

Lance Armstrong also benefited from artificial performance enhancement.

Lance Armstrong is also one in seven billion, drugs or not.

That was indeed the parents point, I believe. Armstrong was still an outlier, and the drugs allowed him to take that further. Even without them he would've been one of the best (assuming all things being equal and no one else has access either).

Still, a mathematician improving vastly on drugs can be a net benefit for society since the work done stays. A cyclist.. I don't see it. Not that I'm advocating for drugs in general here.

This is the most HN sentence available, but:

Sitting down and really learning the internals of a language, it's community and tools enough to construct a large project with competence was definitely significant in my recovery from addiction.

Isn't this the same thing as eating more when you're bored?

See previously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

What about when "daily drill included exploration, learning and finding hidden tasty morsels" becomes the addiction?

Mmm, French cheese.... Belgian beer ...

I just spent three months gallavanting around Europe with my wife and young child, despite being technically homeless. During which time, I successfully quit smoking. However, many people's conservative rational/peer-pressure response to my situation would be "don't spend money" and "buy a house".

Conincidence, or not?

Interesting. Either way that sounds like a glorious way of using your time.

My addictions are all "intellectual"... stocks, gambling, HN, Starcraft, Wikipedia.

Since I've never had any addiction to substances I assume the above is what I am susceptible to.

I never had problems controlling alcohol and I couldn't even get high on the times I tried [thing you smoke]. I can handle a lot of drinks but I just don't really have that desire unless there are hot girls around. [thing] just gives me a headache only.

I'm pretty sure you can just say pot, weed, or marijuana if you want to sound smart. :)

Not trying to sound smart. No point in posting you did [thing] that is illegal in some states.

But you just did.

Actually I did not.

The authorities will never crack your cipher

> No point in posting you did [thing] that is illegal in some states.

You sound like a dork :).

And because I'm not under oath, the authorities can't charge me. And I doubt internet comments are commonly cited in court proceedings when charging illegal drug consumption.

This is a minor variation of a 1980s result. It's the environment that is the biggest factor in drug use. This study does not disambiguate that it's intellectual pursuits over general higher standard of living. So I question the conclusion but not the effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

I don't think the research does an adequate job differentiating intellectual activity from agency. Is the learning and exploring their substitute for addiction? Or is it the linking of action and effort to reward?

I'd be interested in comparing the inert mice to mice that are rewarded sporadically for a physically demanding but intellectually effortless task, such as running on a mouse wheel. I'd guess the results would be similar.

As others are noting, I suspect you could accurately trim that down to "Pursuits may buffer the brain against addiction." When all you're thinking about is the next bike ride you're going to go on, or how your homebrew cider is going to turn out next week, or what new thing your niece is going to surprise you with... those sorts of things work the reward system well, too.

OK, so basically memrise.com is the only thing between me and hard drugs. All the more reason to go practice my Mandarin.

A chess master / drug friendly guy once told me that his standard for ways of living relate to his chess game. He said he tried crack for a week or two, and while he was on it, his chess game suffered; that was enough for him to sober up.

Seems like this general principal is how faith can be used to treat alcoholism

I'm wondering why there isn't more research towards reducing the side-effects of drugs.

I mean, drugs are clearly a product that has certain desirable properties. So why aren't we improving the product, rather than trying to keep people away from it?

hmm. I read the title as "incremental pursuits..."

which made me wonder...

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