there are other brain circuits implicated in addiction one of them has to do with the regulation of stress and i stress is necessary stress is not a bad word stretched as just means every sponson a body to a threat chronically elevated they undermine our health in a million ways so there has to be a special education circuits stress regulation circuit that will mount the necessary stress response in face of a threat but will then cool it down when a threat as a threat has passed in attics that's floating doesn't function a very well so what they do is that in an infected in animals or human beings when you infuse them with cortisol they're more likely to want to use alcohol or cocaine to su themselves so what the addict has is they sued themselves with the addictive behaviors of the cells through their itself to thing is what's going on and any of you've had addictive behaviors whether it's gambling or sex or shopping or food or substances you know that your chance of a relapse increase significantly when you're stressed because you don't know a lot of handle the stress with your brain circuitry or stress regulation just isn't up to the task and finally saliently there's the question of imposed regulation imposed regulation means that when i have an urge to do something there's something up here in the cortex that says no that's not appropriate way now and you do brain scans on drug addicts and more significant finding of the commonest finding is abnormality an area of the brain that regulates impulses so somebody very astutely said there probably addiction is not lack of free will but lack of a few won't there's nothing to say no with now the question is why not then and really again the question i'm exploring is what makes somebody addicted well this is where medical education is saw behind the when it has no chance to escape or to fight back so twelve years ago harvard probably caught up finally caught up with me and  here's an article from the harvard center on the developing child and this appeared in the journal pediatrics which is the significant pediatric journal in north america and they see growing scientific evidence demonstrates that the social and physical in my amants that threaten human development because of scarcity or stress or instability may lead to short term physiological and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation but which may come at a significant cost to long term outcomes in learning behavior health and longevity and what they're saying is that when people are stressed early in life they will adapt to that stress and those that patients help them and urine survive the immediate situation but will cost them in the long term and there's a behavior health and even their life expectancy so my intuition was that a d h d is one of these conditions which is in response to stress and people tune out and so on but i didn't know when i had to come to seattle to find up and i find it only by accident because i want to a party and i met a psychologist there who says she was coming to seattle to hear lectures here i think hell that you know sort of fellow campus now that i think of it by two leading figures and brain developmental the human brain actually develops an interaction with the environment so that which circus develop and which to not as a lot to do with the early environment so they are my mentors what shapes the physiology of the brain and this harvard article which sums up all that information very beautifully says and i just called briefly fragile foundation for all the health learning and behavior that follow then they go on to say the interaction of genes and experiences literally shape the circuitry of the developing brain and it's critically influenced by the mutual responsiveness of adult child relationships particularly in the early childhood years so the key factor shaping human brain development turns out to be the quality of human relationships and as a diet dan siegel said human connection is making the ronal connections make nerve connections in the brain which validated my intuition about a d h t that she was going on here is that it's a response to stress and it's a response to stress when a child is helpless and can't is cable fight back therefore to lose out and as such a time when every second millions six months of age whose mothers were not depressed and they found that they could tell from the easier the child whose mother was the person with wasn't in other words the electrical wiring of the brain is shaped by the quality of usual response in us of parent child relationships and so you can't look for the answer in individual brain you have to look at was the environment that shaped that brain here's a quote by a very great  icons the caller just but also spiritual leader teacher he says the child is very open and can feel the pain and suffering going on its immediate environment the child is aware of its own his own body and can also feel the tension rigidity and pain in the body of the mother or of anyone else he is with if the mother is suffering the baby suffers through the pain the biggest this church the organism never develops the confidence that it can regulate itself that things will happen the way they should and that sums up the experience of a lot of people i think that people with mental health logic you know a horse can run in the first day of life we can't do that for eighteen to twenty four months which is to say that the horse is a year and a half to two years you know dance of us when it comes to brain development and as for a very simple reason larger had a narrower pelvis and if anybody here is given birth you know exactly what the punch line is the punch line is already at birth the head is the biggest part of the body isn't a big it was any bigger we would get born which means we have to get out of there prematurely which means that most of our development has to occur after birth and again which circus develop in which to not depends on environmental and put up this process already begins in utero so that developmental problems behavior problems learning problems later on in life that also physiologically have greater difficulty regulating their stresses that have abnormal levels of stress hormones in their bodies and this process continues throughout  childhood but it's more significant in the first few years so the necessary condition for the development of these crucial brain circuits or emotional self regulation and motivation and so on is the presence of non stressed non depressed emotion available consistently vailable attuned parenting caregivers and i want to be actually find when we actually look at the lives of people who are drug addicted significantly so and particularly the ones that i worked with in m childhood not one not even by accident as were many of them and by the way or abused in other ways and if that were only my individual impression you might say it's either a bleep of some kind i'm attracting those kind of people into my practice i don't know what you might say but that's also what the large scale epidemiological study shore here in the united states thousands and thousands of them people have been studying these studies came out of actually the concern about obesity these doctors are working with the kaiser permanente system in california san diego they're working with an obesity clinic found they could help people lose weight but found they couldn't help people keep  weight and finally that is something quite radical for a medical doctor they listen to their patients and and i love knocking my profession and it's and it's not universally to what i'm saying but unfortunately it's rather to generally speaking for a whole lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the good intentions of the physician but the point is that but then find out that these people have been traumatized and then they did these studies called the adverse childhood experiences studies casey's thirty's and you can go to the web the internet and download your own a score now if we each of these average childhood experiences which includes physical sexual emotional abuse the death of a parent the jailing of a parent a divorce in other words some disruption of the attachment relationship that's so crucial for healthy development physiologically and psychologically mental illness among the parents violence in the family a parent being jailed and by the way what are we doing when we're dealing of this people were making sure that the next generation will be also be troubled for each of these adverse experiences the risk of addiction goes up exponentially and by the time a male child has that six of these experiences his risk of becoming a substance dependent injection using addict is forty forty six s or forty six hundred percent greater than that of a male child did not touch experience no why does trauma like that predisposed to addictions and i'm not saying that everybody is traumatized becomes an addict but i'm saying that the more trauma there is the likelihood is far greater of addictive behaviors later on because it's an adaptation the addiction is a self soothing behavior you see it in little babies their suck their thumbs will they not when they're not getting the nourishing they need emotionally well they're rock themselves or they are masturbate these are selves with the behavior these are adaptations to lack of nurture so why is it hard is it that that that early trauma or emotional loss then well first of all because those brain circuits will not develop the way they ought to so physiologically it has an effect it's not just an emotional event it's a physiological event that has an impact on brain circuitry possibly for a lifetime number one number two it gives you that to mendis pain that then you try and soothe to substance use or some other victim behavior so you've got the pain number three you're fundamentally ashamed of yourself because the child looks at everything in a big egocentric perspective like he or she is the center of the universe when stuff happens it's because of him and her so it goes stuff happens i'm a good person i must be but if money's unhappy if i'm being beaten or being traumatized then that's because i'm worthless there's a deep sense of shame about the very self that pre dates the addiction of course the addiction induces more shame as i can tell you personally but but the shame is there already and then because of that shame you more surely isolate yourself which further increases the drug addict is different from the rest of us that's another myth in my book and i know as i know that some students have difficulty with this i talk about my own addiction to purchasing classical music how can you compare that to the heroin addictions of your clients well i mean the differences are obvious i'm a respectable physician who after i do my work into a comfortable home in a respectable neighborhood i don't have a child v i but i did see so the differences are obvious but the similarities are far more interesting when in the grips of that buying fever i can't stop i have to keep going back one week i spent a thousand dollars without intending to just because i couldn't stop myself going to the store i lied to my wife for years ignored my children's ne because what was in my mind was which piece of music to get next i was a mention in the book i once left a woman in labor in hospital to get a symphony and as they say in the book i still have made it back on time but in the aisles of the classical music store there is evil music pushers and your hey buddy have you heard the latest symphony performance of mozart's number forty haven't my god just listen his feet are listen you know so i missed the delivery of that baby was not twenty four years old and bicycle across canada to go to university and in the atlantic probably in  it's not benign and one of my after i'm not up to the classical music because after all the music of bach and given away or sold again just with the stuff i have left at home if i started listening now and did not nothing but listen it would take years for me to hear all the music already out it's not about the having it's about the getting because the getting the getting releases dopamine in the brain and that makes me very present of a alert and very alive and very motivated and i like that and i think just one more but the next day the high is gone i feel listless and depressed again and i start thinking about the one that i didn't pick up that i need to get back in and get now not how is that different from what my drug addicts do as a matter of fact if you look at the brain scans of shopping addicts or addiction from my perspective and i may have said it before but any behavior that you create that gives you temporary pleasure temporary relief but what you continue to participate in despite long term negative consequences that's what in the dictionary clearly addiction goes way beyond substances and the brain circuitry is the same doesn't matter what the target is whether it's internet or pornography or sex or gambling or drugs the same brain circuits involved it's the same emotional dynamics it's the same spiritual emptiness that same hungry ghost phenomenon that drives you to keep looking to the outside fo something and addictions are always about trying to complete yourself from the outside even temporarily no unfortunately every time you do that you also want yourself because every time you do that what you will say to yourself is i'm not enough of forcing your worthlessness but it's not that the drug addict is any different from anybody else that just happened to be there particular route and then when you ask about the legal question well that's just a whole other nightmare because there's absolutely no science logic or humanity behind the drug laws that's you know reason why here we should be legal and tobacco should not be tobacco is far more dangerous to your health alcohol does far more damage to the body and the organs in the brain than heroin well now this is a shocking fact but simple science so by what logic advertise alcohol in super bowl and then people can go drinking and you know and that's perfectly legal what sense are we actually making so the whole issue of drug addiction is beset by mythology let me come back to the social question so here's a call from let me read you a couple of course i mentioned the genetic argument and let me just point out to you that studies are both animals and human beings have shown that even if you're born with certain genes that can predispose you addiction it's the environment that will decide whether to be addicted or not so if you're a monkey born with a certain gene that protects a little bit altered which would predispose them to addiction but if they're brought up in nurturing homes they have no more chance of being in the dictated than anybody else so the whole genetic argument is tiresome and utterly boring as for  scientifically and it's based on utterly false premises primary is that if because something runs in a family it's going to be genetic which is you know shallow logic and i'm not going to go into the if somebody asked me about it i'll say more about it the twin studies and all that but they're all based on false logic and that nobody said it better than louis maine on who's a writer and then your crew magazine and he said it's all in the genes is an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are why should anyone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth it can't be the system there must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere now if you actually look at the system there's another quote i'd like to offer you this is by hubert selby jr was an american author who died some years ago but in his presses for his wonderful addiction novel requiem for a dream which is year but but hubert selby writes i believe that to pursue the american dream is not only theory but self destructive because ultimately destroys everything and everyone involved with it by definition it must because it nurtures everything except those things that are important integrity ethics truth are very heart and soul why the reason is simple because life is about giving not about getting not like not getting so as soon as you buy into that ethic of materialism the next book just put the right it got toxic culture so if you buy into that you from you to nature and from social connection and you're setting yourself against the videos or that itself is destructive and hard that shows up we can clearly see by the examples of the a l population so i raised the issue that they had these substances they weren't addicted well three years ago i was leading a healing ceremony with an indian band in their long house in british columbia working with a plant and there was a fifty four year old native woman there who said she'd been addicted since she was nine years old  torn from the arms of their parents very early and they were sent to these religious run residential schools where they would educate the in the and out of the india so carly gets to the residential school she's four years old this is in british columbia by the way in the early one nine hundred sixty we're not talking into history here she speaks her tribal language that's a no no you're not supposed to do that the teacher in