Name: 【TED】Rachel Wurzman: How isolation fuels opioid addiction (How isolation fuels opioid addiction | Rachel Wurzman)
Uploaded: 2018-11-19T18:13:41.000Z
Duration: 18 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Reflexive pronouns

I've asked myself this question from the time I was about seven,

when I was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome.

characterized by stereotyped movements I perform against my will, called tics.

in the sense that they occur without any conscious attention

But there's a funny thing about how I experience tics.

They feel more unvoluntary than involuntary,

because I still feel like it's me moving my shoulder,

Also, I get this uncomfortable sensation, called premonitory urge,

and particularly when I'm trying to resist them.

Now, I imagine most of you out there understand what I'm saying,

but unless you have Tourette's, you probably think you can't relate.

So, let's try a little experiment here and see if I can give you

a taste of what my experience feels like.

That's approximately what my tics feels like.

Now, tics and blinking, neurologically speaking, are not the same,

but my point is that you don't have to have Tourette's

to be able to relate to my experience of my premonitory urges,

because your brain can give you similar experiences and feelings.

So, let's shift the conversation from what it means to be normal versus sick

to what it means that a majority of us are both normal and sick.

Because in the final analysis, we're all humans

whose brains provide for a spectrum of experiences.

And everything on that spectrum of human experiences

that assume a spectrum of different states.

So again, what does it mean to be normal,

when sickness exists on the extreme end of a spectrum of normal?

As both a researcher who studies differences in how individuals' brains

and as a Touretter with other related diagnoses,

I have long been fascinated by failures of self-regulation

on the impulsive and compulsive behavioral spectrums.

Because so much of my own experience of my own body

So with the spotlight on the opioid crisis,

I've really found myself wondering lately:

Where on the spectrum of unvoluntary behavior

do we put something like abusing opioid painkillers or heroin?

By now, we all know that the opioid crisis and epidemic is out of control.

Ninety-one people die every day in this country from overdose.

the number of deaths from heroin increased by a factor of six.

And something about the way that we treat addiction isn't working,

It is a fact that people suffering from addiction

when it comes to their behavior around drugs, alcohol, food

or other reward-system stimulating behaviors.

That addiction is a brain-based disease state

indeed, how we relate to the concept of disease when it comes to addiction --

makes an enormous difference for how we treat people with addictions.

So, we tend to think of pretty much everything we do as entirely voluntary.

But it turns out that the brain's default state

is really more like a car idling in drive than a car in park.

is actually things that we have become programmed to do

Have you ever joked that your brain was running on autopilot?

And the brain's autopilot is in a structure called the striatum.

So the striatum detects emotional and sensory motor conditions

and it knows to trigger whatever behavior you have done most often

Do you know why I became a neuroscientist?

Because I wanted to learn what made me tick.

I've been wanting to use that one in front of an audience for years.

So in graduate school, I studied genetic factors

that orchestrate wiring to the striatum during development.

And yes, that is my former license plate.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Rachel Wurzman: How isolation fuels opioid addiction (How isolation fuels opioid addiction | Rachel Wurzman)

mental

evidence

crisis

practice