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Tag: neurotransmitters

  • Gambling it all away? The connection between gambling and drug addiction

    Screaming in the last 10 seconds of a football game, the score is neck and neck, and your team has the ball on the 20 yard line. Needless to say your heart is beating like crazy in anticipation to see the outcome. Would it be beating any harder if you had money riding on the…

  • The brain-addiction connection: Cocaine, dopamine, and more

    Okay, so we’ve covered how the brain’s neurons communicate with one another normally; now let’s learn about how drugs mess things up to produce their specific effects. Since the brain-addiction relationship is different for different drugs, we’ll do this one by one, starting with cocaine: Cocaine One of the most commonly abused drugs, cocaine interrupts…

  • The brain-addiction connection : Neurons and neurotransmitters

    As I’d mentioned in an earlier post, while many people experiment with, or use, drugs at some point in their lives, only a small percentage (between 10%-15%) develop chronic drug abuse and dependence problems. While some of the specifics of what makes one person more likely to move from recreational use to addiction are still being…