Zeitgeist: Moving Forward Page #3

is a highly arbitrary phenomenon in our society

and it seems like the greater the harm

the more respectable the addiction.

[The Myth]

There is a general myth that drugs, in themselves, are addictive.

In fact, the war on drugs is predicated on the

idea that if you interdict the source of

drugs you can deal with addiction that way.

Now, if you understand addiction in the broader sense

we see that nothing in itself is addictive.

No substance, no drug is by itself addictive

and no behavior is by itself addictive.

Many people can go shopping without becoming shopaholics.

Not everyone becomes a food addict.

Not everyone who drinks a glass of wine becomes an alcoholic.

So the real issue is what makes people susceptible

because it's the combination of a susceptible individual

and the potentially addictive substance or behavior

that makes for the full flowering of addiction.

In short, it's not the drug that's addictive

it's the question of the susceptibility of the individual

to being addicted to a particular substance or behavior.

[Environment]

If we wish to understand what

then makes some people susceptible

we actually have to look at the life experience.

The old idea, although it's old but it's still

broadly held, that addictions are due to some genetic cause

is simply scientifically untenable.

What the case is actually is that certain life experiences

make people susceptible.

Life experiences that not only shape the person's

personality and psychological needs

but also their very brains in certain ways.

And that process begins in utero.

[Prenatal]

It has been shown, for example

that if you stress mothers during pregnancy

their children are more likely to have

traits that predispose them to addictions

and that's because development is shaped

by the psychological and social environment.

So the biology of human beings is very much affected by

and programmed by the life experiences beginning in utero.

Environment does not begin at birth.

Environment begins as soon as you have an environment.

As soon as you are a fetus, you are subject to whatever

information is coming through mom's circulations.

Hormones, levels of nutrients...

A great landmark example of this is

something called the Dutch Hongerwinter.

In 1944, Nazis occupying Holland

for a bunch of reasons, they decide to

take all the food and divert it to Germany;

for three months everybody there was starving.

Tens of thousands of people starve to death.

What the Dutch hunger winter effect is:

if you were a second or third trimester fetus during the starvation

your body 'learned' something very unique during that time.

As it turns out, second and third trimester is when your body is

going about trying to learn about the environment:

How menacing of a place is it out there?

How plentiful? How much nutrients am I getting

by way of mom's circulation?

Be a fetus who was starving during that time and your body

programs forever after to be

really, really stingy with your sugar and fat and

what you do is you store every bit of it.

Be a Dutch Hunger Winter fetus and half a century later

everything else being equal

you are more likely to have high blood pressure

obesity or metabolic syndrome.

That is environment coming in a very unexpected place.

You can stress animals in the laboratory when they're pregnant

and their offspring will be more

likely to use cocaine and alcohol as adults.

You can stress human mothers. For example, in a British study

women who were abused in pregnancy

will have higher levels of

the stress hormone cortisol in their placenta at birth

and their children are more likely to have conditions that

predispose them to addictions by age 7 or 8.

So in utero stress already prepares the gun

for all kinds of mental health issues.

An Israeli study done on children

born to mothers who were pregnant

prior to the onset of the 1967 war...

These women, of course, were very stressed

and their offspring have a higher incidence of schizophrenia

than the average cohort.

So, there is plenty of evidence now that prenatal

effects have a huge impact on the developing human being.

[Infancy]

The point about human development and

specifically human brain development

is that it occurs mostly under the impact of the environment

and mostly after birth.

Now, if you compare us to a horse

which can run on the first day of life

we see that we are very undeveloped.

We can't muster that much neurological coordination

balance, muscle strength, visual acuity

until a year and a half, two years of age.

That's because the brain development in the horse

happens in the safety of the womb

and in the human being, it has to happen after birth

and that has to do with simple evolutionary logic.

As the head gets larger, which is what makes us into human beings

the burgeoning of the forebrain is

what creates the human species, actually.

At the same time, we walk on two legs. So, our pelvis narrows

to accommodate that. So now we

have a narrower pelvis, a larger head

Bingo! We have to be born prematurely.

And that means the brain development that in other animals

occurs in utero

in us, occurs after birth

and much of that under the impact of the environment.

The concept of Neural Darwinism simply means

that the circuits that get the appropriate input from the environment

will develop optimally and the ones that don't

will either not develop optimally or perhaps not at all.

If you take a child with perfectly good eyes at birth

and you put him in a dark room for five years

he will be blind thereafter for the rest of his life

because the circuits of vision require light waves for their development

and without that even the rudimentary

circuit's present and active at birth

will atrophy and die and new ones will not develop.

[Memory]

There is a significant way in which

early experiences shape adult behavior

and even and especially early

experiences for which there is no recall memory.

It turns out that there are two kinds of memory:

there is explicit memory which is recall

this is when you can call back facts

details, episodes, circumstances.

But the structure in the brain which is called the hippocampus

which encodes recall memory

doesn't even begin to develop fully until a year and a half

and it is not fully developed until much later.

Which is why hardly anybody has

any recall memory prior to 18 months.

But there is another kind of

memory which is called implicit memory

which is, in fact, an emotional memory

where the emotional impact and the interpretation the child makes

of those emotional experiences are ingrained in the brain

in the form of nerve circuits ready to fire

without specific recall.

So to give you a clear example

people who are adopted have a

lifelong sense of rejection very often.

They can't recall the adoption.

They can't recall the separation of the birth mother

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