Whether you gobble up the entire bar or ration it out depends on the strength of your working memory. According to Hofmann, the stronger your working memory is, the better your reflective system is at controlling your impulsive system.
Prior to the unexpected windfall, Whittaker had to exercise financial restraint to ensure that he didn’t overspend. This required his Conductor to moderate spending by engaging the reflective system: I really want that mansion, but I can’t afford it. But after his lottery win, he was in a financial position where any shiny thing that caught his eye—from diamonds to speedboats—could be had without reflection. Because moderation of his spending was no longer required, his Conductor basically retired from its job, and the impulsive system reigned unchecked. As Whittaker’s self-control vanished, so did his lottery winnings. As one of Whittaker’s friends aptly observed to USA Today, the win “overwhelmed him … the more you have, the more difficult it is to resist temptation.”
Out of Control
Working memory plays a pivotal role in addiction, whether it’s addiction to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, overeating, shopping, gambling, pornography, or even video gaming. The stronger your Conductor, the easier it is to resist addictive behavior. The weaker your Conductor, the more likely you are to fall into the grips of addiction.
Have you ever wanted something so badly, been involved in something so deeply, or been fixated on something so intensely that nothing else seems to matter? Even if the object of your obsession is bad for your health, relationships, career, or finances? And even if it is ruining your life? You’re certainly not alone. Just take a look at the numbers. More than 68 million Americans smoke. Nearly 30 million are affected by substance abuse, and another 22 million adults are addicted to Internet pornography. As many as 24 million are compulsive shoppers, and 6 to 8 million are problem gamblers. And don’t forget the estimated 75 million adults and 12.5 million kids who are obese. Why do so many of us become enslaved to our bad habits and addictions?
The Addicted Brain
In 2011, the American Society of Addiction Medicine redefined addiction as “a chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory, and related circuitry.” Nora Volkow, an eminent neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is the leading researcher in the area of the addicted brain. The great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky, Volkow is making her own mark on history with more than a decade of peer-reviewed research suggesting that addictive behaviors become compulsive because the brain’s control mechanism is disrupted. Here is what is happening in the addicted brain.
Salience and Reward
Salience is the relative importance of an object or behavior, and reward is the pleasurable feelings we derive from that object or behavior. Salience and reward are closely linked in the addicted brain. Addictive substances and behaviors are extremely high in salience to addicts, which means they focus their attention on them. When addicted people engage in addictive behavior, the nucleus accumbens, located deep within the brain, releases a big hit of dopamine, the reward neurotransmitter. Eating a chocolate bar gives you a little squirt of dopamine; eating a hot fudge sundae with cookies ’n’ cream ice cream, whipped cream, sprinkles, and nuts delivers a heftier dose of the neurotransmitter. And taking a drug like heroin causes a huge surge of dopamine. The reward that an addict gets from the dopamine gives that activity great salience, making it their singular focus.
Memory
People who have addictions remember the salience of the activity because the event is registered in both the amygdala and hippocampus. The brain’s emotional center, the amygdala, registers the intense salience and reward and locks it into the memory bank, the hippocampus.
Drive
Drive is what motivates addicts to continue in their behavior. It pushes them to repeat the behavior again and again. Drive originates in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG), brain regions often associated with working memory. Further research is necessary to determine the degree to which working memory is involved in drive. What happens when an addict craves a drug, is that their OFC and ACG become hyperactive and boost drive intensely. If working memory is involved in drive, it may be like a broken record, replaying the desire to procure the reward, over and over. Indeed, these regions of an addict’s brain resemble those of people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorders.
(Out of) Control
The control aspect in this process is located in the PFC, the home of working memory. For nonaddicts, the PFC helps them resist harmful behavior. For example, when you put your hand over the top of the wine glass rather than accepting another glass, your PFC has been activated to make that decision. But in the addict’s brain, this behavior is reversed: when a person is engaged in the addictive behavior, the PFC is turned down to low. As you would expect, this diminished activity is associated with less self-monitoring and behavioral control. It’s as if the Conductor has left the stage. The salience of how good the addictive substance or activity feels overrides the PFC’s ability to rein in the behavior. When an addicted person craves something, as opposed to being engaged in the behavior or using the substance, the PFC increases in activation. While the person is craving, the PFC recruits working memory to bring up the past memories of the salience and reward, as well as to strategize how to satisfy the urge. In the addicted brain, the working memory Conductor, which should be in control, is under the control of the addiction.
The Addiction Process
In the addicted brain, working memory is recruited as a key component of the addictive process, helping to satisfy the addiction rather than inhibiting it. For illustrative purposes, this image shows the addictive process linearly, though the various stages may not always occur in this sequence.
We got a firsthand glimpse into obsessive behavior when Ross bought a really cool first-person video game about a week before Christmas in 2003. During the day, Ross was a mild-mannered academic, but at night he morphed into an ex–Navy SEAL working in the top-secret Third Echelon subbranch of the National Security Agency. Ross was entrusted with saving the United States from a breakout war with China. He used his stealth and considerable military acumen to stalk enemies and infiltrate their headquarters, even rescuing the United States from the detonation of a nuclear bomb.
You would think Tracy would have been proud of all his hard work and his determination to see the mission through. But in spite of the fact that Ross had single-handedly prevented World War III, she was concerned that he was spending too much time in this fantasy world. He did, after all, skip all of his favorite Christmas activities: going to the German Christmas market in Edinburgh with its steaming mugs of glühwein, hiking in the snow, making Christmas cookies and candy, and caroling on Christmas Eve. The video game had turned Ross into a veritable Christmas Grinch.
For Christmas Day, Tracy banned him from playing. And although Ross found himself moping about and fretting nonstop about what might happen if the game’s shadowy criminal activated the nuclear device while he was celebrating the holiday, he realized that maybe Tracy was right: he had fallen into the grips of video game obsession. He snapped the disc in two and swore off video gaming for good, a pledge yet unbroken.
A lot of gamers are able to moderate the siren call of really awesome video games and do other things aside from assaulting the Sith Lord, winning the Grand Prix, or building a new civilization. But research shows that one in ten video gamers nationwide exhibit signs of addictive behavior. The web is full of stories from gamers who have become obsessed to the detriment of their work