Welcome!

For this special podcast I asked Deep Divers Mark and Jenna to put their heads together and do the best they could to explain addiction as parasitic behavior – how looking through that lens helps explain all the strange things we know about addictions. So they sat down together, and (after drinking way too much digital coffee) they really put some serious effort into the project. I have to hand it to them. They did a pretty good job explaining things in the time they had to work with – about a quarter hour. Enjoy!

The ideas in this Deep Dive are drawn from my new book, Reimagining Psychology: New Light on Addictions and Other Rogue Habits, now available on Amazon.com. The music is “Walking with Billie” by talented guitarist and composer Michael Kobrin. You can find more of his tracks on YouTube. Jenna and Mark are AI characters produced by Google’s incredibly sophisticated learning tool NotebookLM, available at https://notebooklm.google.com.

One of the confusing things about addiction is that the addict seems to be voluntarily choosing things that are really hurtful - not just for the addict, but for the people they care most about. The same confusion comes up when we see the executives of addiction-based companies voluntarily making choices that harm their customers.

Why? We ask ourselves. How could they act that way? When we speak to the addict, or to the executive, they seem like ordinary people, not monsters.

We can dispel some of our confusion, oddly enough, by asking another question: "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

In this podcast Deep Divers Mark and Jenna talk about the difference between proximate and ultimate causes, and (as usual) conclude with a message of hope.

The behaviorist movement in psychology in the early 1900s provided a number of benefits. The behaviorists’ precise measurement of stimulus and response lent psychology a scientific cachet. And precise measurement led to the development of the technology of behavior control that has been quite valuable in a practical sense.

At the same time, the decision to ignore the subjective experience of animals introduced unnecessary confusion about our behavior. The behaviorists mistakenly believed that the power to shape habits lay outside the animal, in an objectively defined “reinforcer.”

But that wasn’t true at all. The animal’s experience of satisfaction is a direct reflection of its inborn drives – the biology underlying its behavior. The same external stimulus could be reinforcing or not depending on the animal’s drive-based interpretation. And that interpretation varied wildly depending upon the environment within which the stimulus occurs.

This fact is tremendously important for our understanding and treatment of unwanted habits – including addictions. To illustrate, Bruce Alexander’s “Rat Park” experiments convincingly demonstrated that rats are far more likely to use addictive substances when confined to cramped laboratory cages than they are when housed in richer environments. The implications for humans are profound: It's likely that our environments are a more important factor in the development of addiction than is the addictive substance.

In this podcast Deep Divers Mark and Jenna engage in a lively discussion of this topic, and conclude with a message of hope.