Reward Learning

In my blog entry, What Are The Causes of Addiction?, there are four causes listed. The second cause is the one I will be writing about here. 

According to the article, "drugs produce abnormally strong or aberrant associations involved in reward learning, more powerful than natural reward associations". There are two ways that this extremely strong learning system can really impact an addicts decision making. The first is that memories of the drugged experience may be extremely vivid and intrusive. The second is that drug use can alter an addicts memories, causing them to view drug use in a more positive light than is appropriate. If these two statements are true, it seems clear that this would fuel addiction. Basically, an addict does drugs and then can not stop thinking about doing the drugs. In addition, they remember the incidence in an exaggeratedly positive light, perhaps ignoring the consequences. This information seems to fit cohesively with addicts' descriptions of their use, except in the fact that they are able to logically understand and predict the consequences yet use anyways. The author suggests that perhaps the habits are so reinforced by learning that they become compulsive. It seems there must be some other piece that motivates the addict to behave in these compulsive and automatic behaviors though. Addicts put drugs ahead of everything in their lives including basic survival necessities. This suggests that the reward from drug use is superior even to the natural reward associations we need to survive. This clearly seems to be an important factor in what causes addicts to use, but there are other factors to examine.