Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

NEVER ENOUGH

Judith Grisel

The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction

Why does one person becomes a drug addict and not another? This is the central question that has motivated Dr. Judith Grisel for the more than two decades of research she has done into the neurobiology of addiction. Decades later, she and her colleagues are still working to answer this question, and the fruits of that quest can be read in NEVER ENOUGH: THE NEUROSCIENCE AND EXPERIENCE OF ADDICTION.

Once a hopeless addict herself - homeless, disowned and kicked out of three colleges - Dr. Grisel eventually got sober, went back to school and today is an internationally recognized professor and neurobiologist, specializing in addiction research. You can see why this question was of more than just academic interest to her.

NEVER ENOUGH interweaves the author's own remarkable story and insights with the very latest on addiction research and brain function. By translating cutting-edge scientific knowledge into everyday language, readers of NEVER ENOUGH will understand what is different about the brains of addicts even before they pick up their first drink or drug, the ways that addictive substances commandeer normal brain function, and the changes that take place in the brain and behavior as a result of chronic using that make recovery so unlikely. They will also learn about surprising hidden gifts of addiction, for individual addicts as well as society in general.

Translating complex concepts into laymen's terms, the book is enlivened with the author's mordant wit and brutal honesty about her own circumstances.
While not a recovery book, with the epidemic abuse of drugs today - more than one in five people over the age of fourteen is now addicted - she does point towards more effective types of treatment, and comes down heavily on the issues of drug legalization and national policy.

JUDY GRISEL is an internationally recognized expert on the neurobiology of addiction. She is Professor of Psychology at Bucknell University.

Available products
Book Published 2019-02-01 by Doubleday

Comments

What is it about our brains that causes us to crave things that are bad for us, and why are we experiencing an epidemic of addiction? The answers are joinedand, this book suggests, not always obvious. Unusually among academic researchers, behavioral neuroscientist Grisel (Psychology/Bucknell Univ.) has had extensive experience with nearly every addictive substance imaginable; her account of her wayward early 20s, chasing one high after another, is harrowing. A lesson she learned early on provides the title: "there will never be enough drug, because the brain's capacity to learn and adapt is basically infinite." That is to say, feed the brain addictive substances, and that new normal yields an insatiable hunger for homeostasis. "The brain's response to a drug," writes the author, "is always to facilitate the opposite state; therefore, the only way for any regular user to feel normal is to take the drug." The neurobiology of addiction is imperfectly and incompletely known, she writes; there is certainly a genetic component, while brain structures shape and reshape depending on what is passing through them. For instance, if cocaine is a kind of laser hitting a certain point, marijuana is "a bucket of red paint" that touches many neural centers with its feel-goodness. As for alcohol, suffice it to say that the "primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain" gets caught up in the process, which helps explain some of the stupider things people do when drunk. It also explains why in moderate doses, anxiety is quelled while in greater doses it is activated, going back to that homeostasis model. Grisel writes clearly and unsparingly about both her experiences and the science of addictiontobacco and caffeine figure in, as wellmaking plain that there is still much that remains unknown or mysterious about the brain's workings. In the end, she notes, much of our present culture, which shuns pain and favors avoidance, is made up of "tools of addiction." Illuminating reading for those seeking to understand the whos, hows, and wherefores of getting hooked.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/02/12/693814827/a-neuroscientist-explores-the-biology-of-addiction-in-never-enough?t=1550245806313