- Tags:: #📚Books - Author:: [[Marc Lewis]] - Genre:: [[Psychology]],[[Nonfiction]],[[Addiction]] - Source date:: [[2015-05-26]] - Audience score:: 8.18 - Link:: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23214265-the-biology-of-desire - ISBN:: 9781610394376 - Added to vault date:: [[2025-12-29]] - Finished date:: [[2017-01-01]] - Liked:: - Cover:: <img src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421140076i/23214265.jpg" width="100"> ## Why did I want to read it? Soy capaz de ver que tengo una fuerte tendencia a la adicción (aunque nunca me ha causado ningún problema vital, supongo que porque no llega a patología y porque como lo conozco desde hace tiempo, lo compenso con mucha disciplina). ## What did I get out of it? > Is addiction really a disease? This book makes the case that it isn't. Addiction results, rather, from the motivated repetition of the same thoughts and behaviours until they become habitual. Thus, addiction develops-it's learned—but it's learned more deeply and often more quickly than most other habits, due to a narrowing tunnel of attention and attraction (...) (p. xii) > Why should we reject the disease model? The main reason is this: Every experience that is repeated enough times because of its motivational appeal will change the wiring of the striatum (and related regions) while adjusting the flow and uptake of dopamine. Yet we wouldn't want to call the excitement we feel when visiting Paris, meeting a lover, or cheering for our favourite team a disease. Each rewarding experience builds its own network of synapses in and around the striatum (and OFC), and those networks continue to draw dopamine from its reservoir in the midbrain. That's true of Paris, romance, football, and heroin. (p. 163) >It's crucial to remember that it's not just attraction or desire that fuels feedback loops and promotes neural habits. Depression and anxiety also develop through feedback. The more you think negative thoughts or scary thoughts, the more synapses get strung together to generate scenarios involving loneliness or danger. (p. 35) >A couple of researchers, Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson at the University of Michigan, provided two major upgrades to the neuroscience of addiction. The first was a map of the brain geog. raphy of wanting versus liking. What they found is that most of the striatum is in the business of wanting, and only a small area produces the sensation of liking. It seems that evolution devoted a lot more real estate to desire than to the end state-pleasure or relief... (p. 58) >Rumination is the result of a normal brain, doing what it's designed to do, when the brain's owner has entered a cycle of seeking and finding the same thing over and over again. Whether that something is chess, tennis, or methamphetamine, it becomes more mesmerizing, its al ternatives less interesting, with each cycle. That's motivated repetition. Its exactly what goes on in the mind and the brain when we are in love, or at least infatuated, and we cannot think about anything or anyone other than the person we desire. (p. 82) > (Evolution was never very concerned with suffering) (p. 164)