Healing Psychology, Part I - Runaway Habits.

Author J.R.R Tolkien advises, “there is nothing like looking, if you want to find something.” Through most of the last century psychology looked for a way to explain learning in a scientific way.  Researchers found lots of ways to describe learning, but never a truly scientific way to explain it. Oddly, the truth was right in front of them. But they didn't see because they had decided in advance to ignore it. They were looking with their eyes shut. Frustrated, they finally abandoned their quest, turning their attention to other things. That’s too bad, because if we understood normal habits, we could understand abnormal habits such as addictions. Can we see what those researchers didn’t see? Certainly. But we do have to look with our eyes open.

Transcript

This Episode of Healing Psychology begins a reading of Chapter Eight of my upcoming book, Re-imagining Psychology. 

Copyright © Thomas O. Whitehead, 2022   All rights reserved

[Introduction]

Welcome to Part I of the multi-part series, Healing Psychology. The title of this episode is “Runaway Habits (first half).” Previous episodes highlight psychology’s failure to help us explain and control addictions and other disease-like habits. This episode explains how addiction-like habits get out of hand, taking on a life of their own. It details both the process through which they escape control, and the conditions most likely to provoke such an escape.

Lurking within the history of psychology is an unsolved mystery. Through most of the last century psychology struggled to become a Science of Learning—a “hard science” like physics or chemistry. Author J.R.R Tolkien advises, “there is nothing like looking, if you want to find something.” Researchers did look. They looked for years. They found lots of ways to describe learning, but never a truly scientific way to explain it. Strangely, the answer they sought was in plain view. So why did they miss it? Because they had decided in advance to ignore the truth. So they did all their looking with their eyes shut. Frustrated, they finally abandoned their quest, turning their attention to other things. That’s too bad, because if we understood normal habits, we could understand abnormal habits such as addictions. Can we see what the researchers didn’t see? Sure we can. But we do have to look with our eyes open.

Many of the ideas in this episode aren’t mainstream psychology. But you’re invited to listen … anyway.

[Reading]

Runaway Habits

• She saw that we weren’t happy, so she lured us away with treasures and treats and games... She said that she loved us, but she locked us here, and ate up our lives. [1]

- Imprisoned spirit, from the film “Coraline”

Normal habits evolve under the animal’s control. That control comes from its innate drives, and those are built right into its DNA. Like the features of its body, its drives evolved to serve the animal’s needs. A normal habit, under the control of an evolved drive, is subservient. The animal invokes the habit when it senses a need for it. And once the need is filled, it dismisses the habit. 

But addictions and addiction-like habits aren’t normal at all. They have stopped serving the needs of their animal hosts, and have begun serving themselves. Once that happens, they evolve in their own interest. They develop ways to get themselves repeated, over and over, whether their animal host needs them or not. They refuse to be dismissed. They have gained the power to get themselves reproduced at their host’s expense. They are habits gone rogue.

That’s the reality of addictions and other rogue habits. Our current psychology can’t bring this reality into focus. Why not? Because of psychology’s disconnect from its mother science, biology. Biologists do have the concepts we need to bring the reality to awareness. Biologists know about rogue agents, because rogues are everywhere you look in the realm of biology. So, if we want to understand rogue habits, we should use biological concepts. They are the key to understanding. 

We can compare self-reproducing, addiction-like habits to biological diseases, parasitic diseases of two kinds. First, let’s compare them to cancerous tumors. In biology, tumors are masses of abnormal cells. Though these cells were once just normal components of the animal’s self, they have mutated into a malignant form. Cancerous cells have escaped the body’s regulation. They are cells gone rogue. 

Rogue habits are similar. Like cancerous cells, these habits were once normal parts of the self. But they have escaped their regulation, mutating into malignant forms. So, we might think of them as “cancerous habits.”

Second, we can compare rogue habits to another kind of parasitic disease—viruses. Interestingly, there’s reason to believe that biological viruses come into being in the same way that cancers come into being. They start out as a normal component of a living thing. Mutating, they abandon their allegiance to their host, and begin to relate as parasites. 

Viruses are simple patterns that can reproduce themselves only by exploiting the greater resources of their host. Rogue habits are like that. They can get themselves repeated only by taking advantage of the larger capabilities of their host—the behaving animal. 

But how does a normal habit escape its normal controls? What makes it go rogue? Why would a habit begin relating to the behaving animal as parasite to host? These are all good questions. The answers begin with this observation: animals’ rogue habits most often appear within the frustrating conditions of impoverished environments—cage-like habitats like the ones we find in zoos, ranches, and farms. Locked away from their natural element, animals find it impossible to satisfyingly express their innate drives. Under such artificially barren conditions, their habit development goes haywire, spawning dysfunctional habits—addiction-like habits that are repetitive, stereotypical, and harmful.

Ranchers, zoo-keepers, horsemen and others who deal with animals confined to barren environments are familiar with these abnormal behaviors, because they must cope with the problems they cause. This body of knowledge is no secret. [2] Still suffering from its behaviorist hangover, though, today’s psychology mostly ignores it. 

During decades of intensive experiments with lab animals, behaviorists collected a massive amount of data. Their intent was (1) to clarify the process through which habits are learned, and (2) to codify their observations in a precise set of principles. The information they collected did contain the answers they were seeking. Sadly, though, their historic decision to disregard subjective experience made it impossible for them to correctly interpret their data.

Lacking the necessary conceptual tools, psychology to this day can’t really explain learning. Because they don’t understand normal habits, theorists can’t explain how habits can become abnormal, turning into the malignant processes we call addictions. Fortunately, the appropriate conceptual tools do exist within biology, and we can borrow them. Perceptive biologists recognize that every normal life process has the potential to go rogue, and begin a parasitic existence. They know that a critical function of animals’ immunity is to detect and eliminate such rogues as they appear. When psychological theorists absorb this insight, addictions and other rogue habits will no longer seem so mysterious.

The conventional wisdom

Mainstream addiction professionals see no reason to compare addictions to viruses. These days the conventional wisdom is that the cause of addiction lies in changes to brain circuitry after repeated exposure to addictive chemicals. [3] This position is exemplified by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which maintains that “drugs change the brain—they change its structure and how it works. These brain changes can be long-lasting, and can lead to the harmful behaviors seen in people who abuse drugs.” [4] 

The authors of the DSM 5 express essentially the same view, writing that

• An important characteristic of substance use disorders is an underlying change in brain circuits that may persist beyond detoxification, particularly in individuals with severe disorders. The behavioral effects of these brain changes may be exhibited in the repeated relapses and intense drug craving when the individuals are exposed to drug-related stimuli. [5]  

There’s a measure of truth in this view. Indeed, brain changes do accompany addiction. There is a “correlational” relationship between addictive behavior and brain functioning. One is associated with the other. But should we use a correlation to conclude that brain changes are the cause of addiction? Scientists know they can’t use correlations to reach firm conclusions about causes. Even when two things correlate highly, one is not necessarily causing the other. 

Correlation versus causation

Here’s a fanciful illustration of a correlational relationship. 

One morning a nosy neighbor spots a newlywed couple emerging from their home across the street. Hand in hand, the pair walk to a car on the street. The man gets into the car. He and his wife talk for a few seconds. Then she bends down and kisses him through the car window. The car immediately starts and begins moving down the street. Exactly the same thing happens every weekday for the next three months. The woman kisses the man. Then the car starts and rolls away. The nosy neighbor, who is a behaviorist, concludes that the kiss stimulus (S) is causally linked to the car’s starting response (R). He believes his observations provide evidence of a strong S-R bond governing the car’s behavior. [6]

Here the correlation is perfect. Importantly, one thing always happens just before the other. Over nearly one hundred observations, the kiss has immediately preceded the starting of the car. Is this proof that the kiss is causing the car to start? 

Most people would find that idea ridiculous. Kisses can’t make cars start. A more reasonable interpretation is that both the kiss and the starting of the car are parts of a larger process—the couple’s loving routine for beginning their day. A correlation between two things, even a very high correlation, does not mean that one is causing the other—and that’s true even when they are always in sequence.

The same applies to the correlation between addiction and certain patterns of brain activity. It is undeniable that behavioral change of any kind goes hand in hand with changes in the brain. After all, the brain is the physical structure underlying both behavior and learning. Brain activity and habitual behavior are two aspects of the same learning process—two pieces of the very same puzzle. 

Brain activity and behavior both change during learning. It could hardly be otherwise. But that doesn’t make one the cause of the other. Could it be that, as with the kiss and the car, it would make sense to view them both as parts of a larger process?

An example specific to brain activity may help drive this point home. The striatum is a sub-cortical brain region known to play a crucial role in many aspects of behavior, including habit formation. Studies have correlated changes in the striatum with early and advanced stages of addiction. [7] Can we conclude that changes in the striatum are causing the addiction? 

Before answering, know that this part of the brain is likely involved in all reward-related learning. One study shows that even habitual prayer changes the way the striatum functions. [8] If we believe that changes in the striatum cause addiction, shouldn’t we also believe that brain changes cause prayer? [9] 

There’s another problem with the conventional wisdom about addiction. Even where there are no addictive chemicals involved at all, people fall into patterns of repetitive behavior virtually indistinguishable from drug addictions. Tellingly, the same kind of brain changes accompany these purely behavioral addictions. 

The eating disorders are examples. Others are addiction to gambling, compulsive viewing of pornography, compulsive involvement in sex and romance, compulsive shopping, excessive gaming, overuse of social media, and undue exercising—to name just a few. Techniques that permit imaging of brain activity confirm that such patterns strongly resemble those seen with drug addiction. [10] But there has been no exposure to a drug in these behavioral (“process”) addictions. 

Changes in brain activity do correlate with many habitual behaviors, including both productive and destructive habits. But to interpret one isolated part of a global phenomenon as the cause of all the other parts leads us into circular reasoning. Use of drugs causes brain changes, which causes use of drugs, which causes brain changes, etc. Are brain changes really a good enough explanation for addiction? 

The Demon Drug hypothesis

Why do people become drug addicts? There are lots of predisposing factors. We can be absolutely certain that one of those factors is exposure to drugs. There’s no drug addiction without drugs. Any substance addiction requires initial use of that substance. Do people become addicts simply because they have tried some powerfully addictive, brain-altering substance? 

Some early laboratory experiments seemed to suggest this. It looked like drugs such as heroin, amphetamines, and cocaine impact mammalian brain chemistry so forcefully that just a few episodes of use inevitably left the subject “hooked.” 

Beginning in the early 1960s researchers tested this hypothesis through some clever experiments with animals. They assembled devices that let various animals inject themselves with drugs simply by pressing a lever. In carefully conducted experiments, rats, mice, monkeys, and other mammals voluntarily injected themselves with large doses of these drugs. Sometimes the animals would descend into a frenzy of use, injecting so much so fast that it knocked them stone cold dead. [11] Over decades researchers performed such experiments hundreds of times, mostly with similar results. 

The science seemed solid, and the implications for human substance abuse were downright scary. Researchers concluded that certain chemicals are absolutely irresistible. Craving for addictive drugs must be built into basic body chemistry. If these drugs touch you, the research suggested, they will unavoidably bring you to ruin. Psychologist Bruce K. Alexander calls this the Demon Drug hypothesis. [12]

Most authorities accepted this hypothesis. Even today they continue to assert that exposure to drugs is the cause of addiction. This belief has been used to justify draconian legal penalties and harsh political policy regarding drugs and drug offenders. In fact, it is the rationale behind the so-called War on Drugs.

But a few astute observers noticed flaws in the Demon Drug argument. First, even in areas where addictive drugs are widely available, only a small percentage of people actually become addicted. Second, many people who for years regularly indulge in the recreational use of highly addictive substances like heroin, methamphetamine, alcohol, or cocaine never fall into a pattern experts would consider addiction. Third, the vast majority of people prescribed addictive opioid drugs for medical reasons take large doses for months without developing an addiction. [13] So, it’s clear that addiction following exposure to a drug is the exception, not the rule. 

As philosophy and bioethics professor Hanna Pickard rightly notes, real-world data don’t support the Demon Drug hypothesis. She forcefully argues that the people most likely to maintain chronic use of drugs are those suffering from psychiatric and emotional issues. 

• Put crudely, drugs and alcohol offer a way of coping with intense negative emotions (such as those associated with mood, anxiety, and personality disorders) and other psychiatric symptoms. Hence, unless recovery from comorbid disorders is achieved or symptoms are adequately managed, better life opportunities are available, and alternative ways of coping with psychological distress are learned, patients are unlikely to forgo the use of drugs and alcohol as a way of managing their intense negative emotions and other symptoms. [14]

Hmmm. In the lab experiments, exposure to Demon Drugs led straight to addiction. But in the real world, it most often does not. What’s going on? What might account for this important difference?

An unfulfilling existence

In the late 1970s Dr. Bruce Alexander and his associates came up with a plausible explanation for the Demon Drug conundrum. The essence of their hypothesis was this: living out one’s life cooped up in a typical laboratory cage is a horrible experience. Imprisonment is miserable for any animal—even for the lowly laboratory rat. And here’s where it’s a mistake to overlook the animal’s experience. Because under the frustrating conditions of confinement, drugs offer an escape from misery. 

Alexander and his colleagues wondered if animals living under more fulfilling conditions would find drugs as appealing. Would they welcome a drug getaway if there was less reason to get away? Alexander began with an observation that should’ve been obvious to anyone who knows anything about rats.

• The ancestors of laboratory rats in nature are highly social, sexual, and industrious creatures. Putting such a creature in solitary confinement would be the equivalent of doing the same thing to a human being. Solitary confinement drives people crazy; if prisoners in solitary have the chance to take mind-numbing drugs, they do. Might isolated rats not need to numb their minds in solitary confinement for the same reason that people do? [15]

Alexander’s research group answered that question in a creative way. They dreamed up a pleasant environment for rats, constructing in their lab a veritable rodent Disneyland.

• “Rat Park,” as it came to be called, was airy and spacious, with about 200 times the square footage of the standard laboratory cage. It was also scenic, with a peaceful, British Columbia forest painted on the plywood walls, and rat-friendly with empty tins, wood scraps, and other desiderata strewn about the floor. Finally, relative to the standard laboratory housing of its day, it was a psychosocial paradise, with 16-20 rats of both sexes in residence at once.[16]

The researchers housed one group of rats together in the luxurious Rat Park. They housed a second group individually in typical cramped laboratory cages. The animals of both groups had free access to both plain water and morphine-laced water. The scientists kept a running record of the amounts that individual rats consumed. 

What do you suppose they found? The Rat Park animals “had little appetite for morphine compared with the rats housed in isolation.” [17] Observer Johann Hari summarized the results this way. 

• The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did. [18]

In some of their studies, the lab-caged rats consumed nearly twenty times as much morphine as those living in Rat Park. [19] 

In later experiments Alexander went further still. He first got the rats physically habituated to morphine. He kept them isolated in individual lab cages with nothing but morphine-laced water to drink. Only then did he transfer the furry little junkies to Rat Park. Again, Hari summarizes the result.

• He let them use for fifty-seven days—if anything can hook you, it’s that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is—again—striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. [20]

Alexander and associates confirmed these results in multiple experiments under a variety of conditions. And other researchers have since replicated Alexander’s findings. Obtaining similar results in a study using cocaine rather than morphine, for example, Schenk et al. concluded that “environmental factors play a major role in determining individual differences in the propensity to self-administer cocaine and that, as such, they should be considered more seriously by those interested in the basis and treatment of drug abuse.” [21]

Could it be that a more fulfilling existence makes drug use less likely? Solinas et al, noting that the issue of fulfillment has received little attention, performed a carefully controlled study. His group compared mice raised in enriching environments to mice raised in typical laboratory cages, measuring both behavioral and physiological differences. They concluded that mice raised in rich environments “are protected against the effects of cocaine.” [22]

Alexander summarizes his original Rat Park experiments this way:

• Nothing that we tried instilled a strong appetite for morphine or produced anything that looked to us like addiction in the rats that were housed in our approximation of the normal environment. These results have subsequently been replicated, extended, and analyzed by other psychologists. Therefore, the intense appetite of isolated experimental animals for opioid drugs in self-injection experiments does not prove that opioid drugs have an irresistibly addictive quality, even for rats.[23]

It seems the use of addictive substances is the norm within a highly frustrating environment. But in a more fulfilling environment, it is the exception. This insight has great practical value. Exposure to some Demon Drug is not the greatest risk factor in addiction. Rather, it’s the inability to satisfyingly instantiate inborn, species-specific drives. Though drugs undeniably carry addictive potential, an animal is most likely to actualize that potential when its life is bleak and unrewarding. Exposure to an addictive substance is less important than circumstances that put authentic, natural satisfaction beyond the animal’s reach. [24] [25]

Frustrated animals

Alexander’s studies, and their multiple replications, give reason to believe that an unfulfilling existence—and not exposure per se—is the most important factor predisposing toward addictive behavior. Is there any other support for this interpretation?

There is in fact a huge and entirely separate body of supportive evidence. It flows from practical experience with the frustrated animals housed in farms, ranches, equine facilities, zoos, pet stores, and other settings—animals kept apart from their natural habitats. 

Here’s the key observation: under conditions that artificially restrict a higher animal’s natural expression of its drives, it is more likely to descend into a pattern of stereotypic, repetitive, and unproductive activity. The greater the departure from the animal’s natural environment, the more likely it is that the animal will fall into this abnormal behavior. [26] Significantly, the stereotyped activities of caged animals are almost indistinguishable from addictions. 

Researchers M. Lewis and colleagues summarize these observations succinctly.

• Abnormal repetitive behaviors are commonly displayed in animals housed in zoo, farms, and laboratory environments, as well as animals subjected to early social deprivation. Indeed, repetitive behaviors are the most common category of abnormal behavior observed in confined animals. For example, pacing and route-tracing in birds, sham-chewing and bar-mouthing in pigs; crib-biting and head-shaking in horses; vertical-jumping and backward somersaulting in deer mice; body-rocking and tail-biting in rhesus monkeys; pacing and over-grooming in prosimians; and head-twirling in minks are but some examples of aberrant repetitive behaviors observed in animals maintained in confinement. Repetitive motor behavior appears to be an invariant consequence of experiential deprivation or restriction of all species tested.[27]

It’s worth emphasizing that, in the opinion of these researchers, the emergence of repetitive, stereotypical behavior is “an invariant consequence of experiential deprivation or restriction of all species tested.” In other words, this happens with all higher animals. When restricted to impoverished environments, living conditions that severely limit instantiation of the animal’s inborn archetypes, any drive/habit animal is likely to develop repetitive, unproductive, stereotypic behavior. 

Getting nowhere fast

The hamster wheel is a familiar example of such repetitive, stereotyped behavior. Hamsters are little animals with an archetype that involves “scurrying around.” In its natural environment [28] it would be scurrying to gather food, and attend to other sorts of hamster business. Presumably scurrying while meeting its needs is adaptive for a small prey animal like the hamster, in that it would prevent predators from easily getting hold of it. 

Being cooped up in a cage severely constrains a hamster’s “scurrying.” If it really cuts loose inside its tiny cage, it will be literally bouncing off the walls. But if a so-called exercise wheel is available, the hamster soon discovers that running like crazy inside the wheel instantiates its natural drive to scurry. Within that confined space, the wheel is the “psychologically best” place to scurry. It’s typical for caged hamsters to instantiate the stereotypic habit of running the wheel. 

Is “running the wheel” useful behavior? It’s tempting to say, “Sure. That’s how it gets its exercise.” But in truth the hamster would not be getting exercise in this way were it not deprived of other, more natural, more genuinely fulfilling options. Running the wheel is a sorry alternative to the real thing. 

It is only within the constricted environment of the cage that this atypical behavior crops up. If it worked this way out in the wild, hamster wheels would make fabulous live traps. You could just set up a couple hundred of them in a meadow. Every evening you would make your rounds to collect the exhausted hamsters who have found it utterly impossible to stop running the wheels. 

Stable vices

Behavioral scientists have carefully studied the emergence of useless, repetitive, and persistent stereotypical habits in stabled horses. Since horses are valuable, owners aren’t pleased when the animals seem to be malfunctioning. The repetitive behavior can be detrimental to health. And owners are justifiably concerned when a horse’s abnormal habits lower its monetary value. 

One such stereotyped behavior is “crib-biting” (often including an act called “wind-sucking”). [29] Equine researchers Wickens and Heleski describe the abnormal habit this way.

• Horses exhibiting crib-biting behavior anchor their top incisor teeth on a fixed object (e.g. fence, stall or building structures), pull backward, contract the neck muscles, and draw air into the cranial esophagus emitting an audible grunt.[30]

This behavior isn’t normal for horses. It is a compulsive, repetitive pattern that is quite reminiscent of an addiction. Australian horseman John O’Leary doesn’t mince words. He writes, “Wind Sucking is a vice and it is also a legal trigger for a Veterinary Surgeon to reject a horse during an inspection for sale... Wind Sucking becomes a drug addiction with horses. They are addicts.” [31]

Stalled horses are at risk of developing a variety of unusual repetitive behaviors, including “box walking” (the horse paces or walks in circles constantly), “weaving” (swaying from side to side), vertical head movement or nodding, various oral activities (such as the licking or grasping of stable fittings), and sham chewing or teeth grinding. 

Equine experts Cooper and Albentosa say “Horse owners commonly refer to these activities as stable vices, as if in some way, the horse is at fault.” [32] These pointless activities mystify owners. In view of their ill effects, they label the behaviors “problematic and undesirable,” [33] and desperately search for a way to make the animals stop.

In a disturbing parallel with the War on Drugs, some owners seem to pass moral judgment on their horses’ activities, evaluating their acts as “bad behavior.” Lacking insight into the causes of the behavior, they insist that the horses simply quit doing what they’re doing. They go to extraordinary lengths to prevent indulgence in stable vices. They put restrictive collars on their animals, blanket their stalls with bad-tasting chemicals, dose them with pharmaceuticals, subject them to acupuncture, punish them, and introduce other measures intended to curb their wayward activity. Perhaps it is not too surprising, given that these interventions aren’t grounded in understanding, that the problem behaviors resist change. [34]

Wickens and Heleski conclude, insightfully, that a horse is at risk of taking up a repetitive behavior when “unable to execute a behavior pattern that it is highly motivated to perform, such as feeding behavior; when it cannot escape or avoid a stressful or fearful situation; or when it is kept in confinement or social isolation.” [35] Translated into the language of inherited drives, these experts are saying the risk of stereotypic behavior goes up when the horse cannot instantiate its natural drives—when the horse, in the words of the Stones song, “can’t get no satisfaction.”

Stable vices are a problem for horsemen, and presumably an even bigger problem for their horses. But for the present discussion, they are a useful example. Horses are social animals that in their natural environments roam and graze freely with their herd. Their evolved drives, with embedded archetypes of roaming and grazing and socializing, guarantee they will experience a yearning to engage in these activities. They experience an urge to do the things that evolution has prepared them to do, things that are part of their animal psychology, things they instinctively evaluate as “good.” 

Confinement to stalls deprives horses of fulfillment. Their frustrating circumstances resemble those of rats imprisoned in laboratory cages. It seems highly likely that the Rat Park experiments turned out the way they did because of a feature common to all drive/habit animals. This feature will serve as a springboard for discussion, allowing us to reach beyond proximate causes to an ultimate explanation for addiction. 

There’s your problem

Given the abundance of experimental and practical evidence, it’s hard to miss the link between blocking natural satisfaction and compulsive, stereotyped behavior. The very nature of the drive/habit system predicts this link. 

The drive/habit system is a product of natural selection. Evolution has for hundreds of millions of years been shaping animals’ drives to promote competent individual behavior within their natural environments. But conditions of confinement aren’t natural. Within a cage, animals can’t instantiate their archetypal impulses, except in a highly distorted manner. We can put it this way: Normal mechanisms of habit formation produce abnormal habits under frustratingly abnormal conditions. 

The successful instantiation of an inborn drive yields a subjective sense of fulfillment. What an animal experiences with pleasure is the execution of a previously instantiated habit, or success in creating a new one that expresses an inborn archetype. All animals yearn to fulfill their drives in their species’ characteristic way. Phrased in clunky behavioral terms, animals experience such conditions as “reinforcing.” 

It’s critical to recognize that the need for expression of archetypes goes beyond simply meeting physiological needs. The animal won’t feel satisfied unless it meets those physiological needs in the way experienced as “good” by the animal. How strong is the need for this “good” expression? The answer to this question is important to our discussion, because the maladaptive patterns we call addictions rarely address physiological needs. Addictions are a distorted expression of archetypal drives. 

Indomitable drives

Can the specifics of an inborn drive create an experience of fulfillment—i.e. “reinforcement”—following a behavior that doesn’t actually satisfy any bodily need? Can we imagine a situation where an animal’s natural impulse to instantiate a drive is so compelling that it can end up substantially outside the S-R model, violating “behaviorist” principles? 

The answer is yes. Drawn by the compulsion to express their drives, higher animals can develop habits that don’t address their physiological needs at all. Sometimes these compulsive behaviors actually prevent satisfaction of their needs, bringing them harm. As we have seen, such habits are most likely to emerge within a significantly impoverished habitat—as when the animal is confined to a cage or stall. Knowing this helps us to grasp the continuity between addiction and other forms of repetitive, stereotypic, dysfunctional animal behavior.

Experiments reported in the 1950s by J.P. Seward established that a drive could shape a habit even when the habit failed to meet a basic need for nourishment. This happens when the animal engages in a behavior that’s merely reminiscent of an archetypal activity that has been fulfilling for the species’ ancestors. [36] Seward expressed the idea in behaviorist terms. He said, “Drive reduction seems to be a sufficient condition for response selection.” [37][38] Translated into the terms I am using, Seward’s message is that within an impoverished environment the psychological aspect of a drive can become the dominant influence on habit instantiation. 

A concrete example lies in a phenomenon called “autoshaping,” first described by P. L. Brown and H. M. Jenkins in 1968. [39] Suppose we confine a pigeon to a cage for study. The cage is an extremely impoverished environment for a pigeon. Like most laboratory cages, the design of this one ensures that the pigeon’s normal feeding habits don’t work there. Further, the pigeon has been half starved for a couple of weeks to operationally define its hunger drive as “activated.” 

These conditions consistently frustrate the pigeon’s existing habits. So, we could expect the animal to be open to the instantiation of new habits. But within the constricted environment of its little laboratory cell, its options are very, very limited.

Within the cage, the experimenter has installed a small round button that can be lit up. Every so often the button lights up. Right after it lights, some food appears. The pigeon can peck the button if it chooses, but in this experiment, pecking has no effect on food delivery. It doesn’t make any difference whether the pigeon pecks the button or not—the food will come regardless, right after the button lights up. In this setting pigeons regularly develop the habit of pecking the button just as soon as it lights up, despite the behavior’s seeming completely pointless. 

Now why would the pigeon peck that button? The S-R model certainly doesn’t predict this. According to behaviorist dogma, habits develop because they are reinforced. The experimenter has defined food as the reinforcer, and food hasn’t been delivered in response to pecking. She believes she’s not reinforcing the bird’s pecking. Consequently, the pigeon’s pecking habit seems a mystery. [40] In her way of thinking, the bird’s habit is “useless” because it is not “reinforced.” Because she’s been prohibited from considering the pigeon’s experience, she doesn’t realize that she and the bird are interpreting things differently.

We can’t explain auto-shaping in terms of satisfaction of the bird’s physiological needs. But it’s easy to understand in terms of the pigeon’s evolved drives: pecking for food is what pigeons do. Pecking is the pigeon’s inherited mode of food gathering in its natural environment. To be pecking as it eats is psychologically fulfilling, simply because pecking fits the archetypal blueprint of the pigeon’s drive.

The satisfaction built into an expression of the pecking-for-food drive is substantial. Further experiments show this in an even more dramatic way. In these experiments, the experimenter arranges that if the bird pecks the button when it lights up, the pecking prevents the food delivery. If it can avoid pecking, the hungry bird eats. If it pecks, it doesn’t. But the bird pecks anyway. It seems a mystery. Again, the researcher is confused about reinforcement. He mistakenly believes that food is the reinforcer. He thinks the pigeon is not being reinforced for pecking, because he’s not being given any food. 

From the behaviorist’s perspective, the pigeon should simply learn to avoid pecking. It should simply sit and wait for the food to appear. “But instead,” reports theorist Kent Berridge, “it was found that auto-shaping still developed—albeit somewhat more slowly... The subjects continued to develop and maintain approach and consummatory-like responses directed toward the food cue—even though it cost them a real food reward every time they did so.” [41] Dramatically demonstrating the compelling nature of the bird’s drive, the starving pigeons could not resist “doing what comes naturally,” pecking for their food, even when it caused them to lose the food—the presumptive “reinforcer.”

Sadly, such experiments reveal more about the flaws in behaviorist logic than about their animals. Had their heads been in a different place, they might have heard what their results were shouting out to them—the animals, not the experimenters, decide what’s reinforcing. 

Quite often in the course of his extensive studies, behaviorist icon B.F. Skinner saw counterproductive habits springing up within the constricted environment of his laboratory cages. But his strict behaviorist biases led him to consistently misinterpret what he saw, and what he duly recorded. 

To illustrate, Skinner documented in some detail the repetitive and stereotypic habits that arise spontaneously when hungry, caged pigeons are given bits of food at regular intervals. In his classic 1953 book Science and Human Behavior, he labeled them “superstitious behaviors,” explaining them this way:

• Conspicuous responses which have been established in this way include turning sharply to one side, hopping from one foot to the other and back, bowing and scraping, turning around, strutting, and raising the head...In producing superstitious behavior, the intervals at which food is given are important. At 60 seconds the effect of one reinforcement is largely lost before another can occur, and other behavior is more likely to appear... At 15 seconds the effect is usually almost immediate. When a superstitious response has once been established, it will survive even when reinforced only infrequently. [42]

Because Skinner and his behaviorist colleagues had zero interest in their animals’ interpretation of stimuli, they remained oblivious to the critically important factors behind such unusual behavior: the animal is desperately trying to fit a square peg (its current situation) into a round hole (its drives). A good fit was impossible, given the animal’s severely constrained options. With genuine satisfaction out of reach, all that was left to guide habit formation was the psychological satisfaction flowing from its experience of doing the kind of thing nature designed it to do. The guidance provided by its experience was nowhere near perfect in that environment—and for that reason it led to nonproductive, stereotypical habits.

In truth, the important thing here is not the behavior of Skinner’s animals, but the behavior of Skinner himself. How can we explain his persistent misinterpretation? One could whimsically say that, like the pigeon, Skinner couldn’t resist “pecking.” He couldn’t interpret things in any other way, even though his interpretation didn’t fit. Unable to see beyond his distorted ideology, Skinner explained his pigeon’s strange behavior in terms familiar to him. And like the pigeon, his insistence on doing ony what he was ready to do cost him the reward he really wanted—a genuinely scientific grasp of the learning process.

Summary

·    Evidence from animal research suggests that exposure to addictive substances alone is not enough to create substance addiction. Rather, the animals most susceptible to addiction are those denied the satisfaction of instantiating their natural drives. 

·    Every drive/habit animal studied develops repetitive, nonproductive, stereotypic habits under conditions of environmental constriction, settings that minimize opportunities for natural fulfillment.

·    Impoverishment of the environment makes it more likely that habits will spontaneously begin to promote themselves, escaping the control of the behaving animal. 

·    The sequence of events arising within impoverished environment is predictable, providing a way to comprehend the gradual emergence of addictions. 

[Post Episode]

Thank you for your interest in Part I of Healing Psychology: Runaway Habits (first half). The Healing Psychology series will continue with readings of additional chapters of the book. The title of the next part is, “Runaway Habits (second half).” In that second part we’ll review further details about rogue habits – and reach a conclusion that’s both fascinating and disturbing. Additional information is available on the website, Whiteheadbooks dot com. 

Please join us!

[Music Credits]

“Piano Magic Motive” –  Kevin MacLeod

“Mystic River Stomp” – Tom Whitehead

Guitar – Tom Whitehead. 

Drums – Angel.

[1] The 2009 animated movie Coraline, directed by Henry Selick and with voicings provided by Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher, is categorized as a children's movie. But the subject matter may be of greater interest to adults. One of many possible interpretations is that the movie is an allegory concerning the process of addiction. In this dialog one of three imprisoned spirits reveals how they became entrapped. It is significant that an essential step in the spirits' entrapment was their allowing a parasitic entity to replace their eyes with sewn-in buttons, symbolizing abandonment of their ability to discern what is real.
[2] See, for example [Mason GJ. Stereotypies and suffering, Behavioral Processes, 1991, 25,  103-115] or [Lutz, CK. Stereotypic Behavior in Nonhuman Primates as a Model for the Human Condition. ILAR Journal, 2014, 55, 2, 284–296] or just search online for “stereotypic behavior in captivity.”
[3] Leshner, Alan I. Addiction is a brain disease. Issues in Science and Technology, 2001, 17, 3. Available at http://issues.org/17-3/leshner/.  Accessed 10/22/16.
[4] National Institute on Drug Abuse. Drugs, brains, and behavior: The science of addiction. Available online at www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-addiction/drug-abuse-addiction. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – the nation's medical research agency. As a part of NIH, NIDA is the “official” source of wisdom concerning addiction and drug abuse.
[5] American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013, Page 483.
[6] For this illustration I am indebted to my very first psychology instructor, who used it in his “Introduction to Psychology” course. He was a wonderful teacher. If I could remember his name, I would certainly cite it here.
[7] Yeager LM, Garcia AF, Wunsch AM, Ferguson SM. The ins and outs of the striatum: Role in drug addiction. Neuroscience, 2015, 301, 529-541. Article available online at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc4523218/
[8] Schjodt U et al. Rewarding prayers. Neuroscience Letters, 2008, 443, 165-168.
[9] Some thoughtful people might argue that habitual prayer does resemble a behavioral addiction in important respects. But to go down this path is to miss the point of the example: changes in the striatum accompany the learning of any habit whatsoever. So these brain changes can no more be regarded as the specific cause of addiction than the specific cause of any other habitual behavior.
[10] See for example [Gearhardt AN, Yokum S, Orr PT, Stice HE, Corbin DR, Brownell KD. The neural correlates of “Food Addiction.” Archives of General Psychiatry, 2011, 68, 8, 808-816.]
[11] See for example [Bozarth MA and Wise MA. Toxicity associated with long-term intravenous heroin and cocaine self-administration in the rat. Journal of the American Medical Association, 1985, 254, 81-83.]
[12] Much of the information in this section was drawn from Bruce Alexander’s book The Globalization of Addiction. [Alexander BK. The Globalization of Addiction: A study in poverty of the spirit. 2008, Oxford University Press, New York. Pages 193-195.]
[13] This applies to alcoholism. Covault et. al. report “A large majority (88%) of adults in the US population have consumed alcohol in their lives, and 55% report current (i.e. past month) drinking… Despite the high prevalence of drinking in the population, the past-year prevalence of DSM-IV alcohol dependence (AD) is only 3.5-4.4%” [Covault J, Gelernter J, Hesselbrock V, Nellissery M, Kranzler HR. Allelic and haplotypic association of GABRA2 with alcohol dependence. American Journal of Medical Genetics, 2004, 129B, 1, 104-109. Page 104.]
[14] Pickard H. The Purpose in Chronic Addiction. AJOB Neuroscience, 2012, 3, 2, 40–49. Page 41.
[15] Alexander BK. Addiction: The view from Rat Park. 2010. Online article available from www.brucekalexander.com. Accessed 7/16/2018.
[16] Alexander BK et al, 2008. Page 195.
[17] Alexander BK et al, 2008. Page 195.
[18] Hari J. The likely cause of addiction has been discovered, and it is not what you think. The Huffington Post, Jan 20, 2015 (Updated Jan 25, 2016). Available online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html. Accessed 8/20/2016.
[19] Alexander BK et al, 2008. Page 195.
[20] Hari J, 2016.
[21] Schenk S, Lacelle G, Gorman K, Amit Z. Cocaine self-administration in rats influenced by environmental conditions: implications for the etiology of drug abuse. Neuroscience Letters. 1987, 81, 1, 227-231.
[22] Solinas M, Thiriet N, Rawas R, Lardeux V, Jaber M. Environmental enrichment during early stages of life reduces the behavioral, neurochemical, and molecular effects of cocaine. Neuropharmacology, 2009, 34, 1102-1111. Page 1108.
[23] Alexander BK et al, 2008. Page 195.
[24] The gross differences in outcome produced by differences in the animal's environment should arouse concern in any behavioral researcher who has employed caged animals in his/her research, because it casts considerable doubt on the generalizability of findings.
[25] The finding that individual fulfillment protects against addictive drugs seems quite hopeful. But not everyone is pleased by the idea – especially parties invested in the Demon Drug model of addiction. To illustrate, Avram Goldstein dismissively writes, “A rat addicted to heroin is not rebelling against society, is not a member of socioeconomic circumstances, is not a product of a dysfunctional family, and is not a criminal. The rat's behavior is simply controlled by the action of heroin … on its brain.” [Goldstein A. Neurobiology of heroin addiction and of methadone treatment. Online article on website of American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence.]
[26] McBride SD and Parker MO. The disrupted basal ganglia and behavioral control: an integrative cross-domain perspective of spontaneous stereotypy. Behavioral Brain Research, 2015, 276, 1, 45-58. Page 46.
[27] Lewis M, et al. Animal models of restricted repetitive behavior in autism. Behavioural Brain Research, 2000, 176, 66-74. Page 68.
[28] Hamsters were reportedly first noticed in Syria. They are also native to Greece, northern China, Romania, and Belgium. Their natural environments are warm, dry areas, like sand dunes and areas near deserts. Some of the first domesticated hamsters were brought to the US from Syria. Source: Live Science website. Available online at https://www.livescience.com/27169-hamsters.html
[29] O'Leary J. Controlling the wind sucker. Article posted on website of Australian horseman John O'Leary, dated 2003. Available online at http://www.horseproblems.com.au/problem_horses_and_wind_sucking.htm. Accessed 10/25/16.
[30] Wickens CL, Heleski CR. Crib-biting behavior in horses: A review. Applied Animal Behavior Science, 2010, 128, 1-9. Page 2.
[31] O'Leary J, 2003.
[32] Cooper JJ, Albentosa MJ. Behavioural adaptation in the domestic horse: Potential role of apparently abnormal responses including stereotypic behaviour. Livestock Production Science, 2005, 92, 177–182. Page 179.
[33] Wickens CL and Heleski CR, 2010. Page 2.
[34] McGreevy PD, Nicol CJ. Prevention of crib-biting: A review. Equine Veterinary Journal, 1998, 30, 27, 35–38.
[35] Wickens CL and Heleski CR, 2010. Pages 1-2.
[36] As we will see, partial expression of the animal's archetypes is the factor that leads to response selection in the absence of physiological fulfillment.
[37] Seward JP. Drive, incentive, and reinforcement. Psychological Review, 1956, 63, 3, 195-203. Page 195.
[38] In their published papers researchers of Seward's era had to bend over backward to avoid reference to the experience of their laboratory animals. The concept of “drive reduction” was a way to refer to it indirectly.
[39] Brown PL and Jenkins HM. Auto-shaping of the pigeon's key-peck. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1968, 11, 1, 1-8.
[40] Two of Skinner’s former students, Marian and Keller Breland, pointed out that the psychologists of the time often seemed to think that their animals just shouldn’t be doing what they were doing, violating behaviorist doctrine. The Brelands’ proposed resolution? “When this kind of dispute develops, the animals are always right, and the psychologists had better rethink their theories.” [Schacter et al, 2009. Page 240]
[41] Berridge KC, 2001. Page 248.
[42] Skinner BF. Science and Human Behavior, 1953. First Free Press paperback edition published in 1965. The Free Press, New York. Pages 85-86.