Train Your Mind, Kick Your Craving
Can you think your way out of addiction? Maybe not yet, but the latest results from the burgeoning field of research that examines how mental training can alter the brain—and therefore behavior—say the rest of the answer may be "but probably soon."
In a new study, just published online in Nature Neuroscience and scheduled for the print version later this year, Elizabeth Phelps of New York University and colleagues measured how volunteers responded physiologically (including through brain activity) to a cue that, they were told, meant they were about to win $4. Specifically, the volunteers were shown either a blue square or a yellow square for four seconds; the blue meant they'd win the $4.
As expected, seeing the blue square lit up a region in their brains called the striatum; activity there is linked to the expectation of reward. It's the part of your brain that sits up and pays attention when you think of the barista handing you your iced coffee on a sweltering day, your significant other walking through the door … or the thought of a hit of pot, cocaine or other illegal drug.
So far, as expected. But then the scientists showed people the blue square again, but this time they first told the volunteers either to ''think of the meaning of the blue square, such as a potential reward'' or to ''think of something blue in nature that calms you down, such as the ocean.'' The second strategy reduced activity in the striatum, the scientists find. That suggests that some similar cognitive strategy—the scientists call it "cognitive" because it is a thought, while the craving it has overridden is an emotion—might be used to control urges triggered by "reward-predicting stimuli." They call it "a first step to understanding how top-down modulation may effectively control positive emotions and eventual urges that may arise (for example, drug craving)."
What is so neat about cognitive approaches to overriding something more basic, more primitive, is that neuroscientists are not only applying the technique to more and more conditions, but they're also finding out how it works. And even if you believe, as I do, that neuroimaging data have been oversold, there is no denying the fact that when a PET or fMRI scan shows how a therapy (cognitive or pharmaceutical) alters patterns of brain activity, it is more convincing.