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Recovery Discovery | "Origins of Addiction: The Noble Nematode"

• DeAnn Knighton • Season 4 • Episode 2

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DeAnn and Craig discuss Craig's recent exploration into "A Brief History of Intelligence" by Max Bennett, which explores the evolution of intelligence and AI. Craig highlights the connection between AI advancements and our understanding of biological intelligence, using the example of the nematode worm, which has 302 neurons and exhibits simple forms of intelligence and addiction. They explore how nematodes' behavior can inform our understanding of substance use disorders, emphasizing the concept of valence and the importance of movement in addiction. 


Link to related blog post by Craig Knighton: 

https://www.showupandstay.org/blog/the-noble-nematode-origins-of-addiction


Reference:

Bennett, M. S. (2023). A brief history of intelligence: evolution, AI, and the five breakthroughs that made our brains. Mariner Books. 

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deann@showupandstay.org

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Music and Audio Production by Katie Hare.
https://www.hare.works

DeAnn Knighton:

Hi. Welcome back to the recovery discovery podcast. I'm your host, deannn, and I'm also here with my co host Craig. Hey, DeAnn, today we're going to talk about some of the research and things that we have been exploring. In particular, Craig has been doing a lot of deep dives into some subjects related to some of the guests that we want to have on this show moving forward, and we thought it would be great to hear a little bit more about what he has in the works. So Craig, why don't you start us off with, what is it that you have been reading

Craig Knighton:

this week? Well, I can't claim that it's this week that I'm reading this, because this is actually something I read earlier in my retirement, not long after the start of the year, but it really stuck with me. It stuck with me enough that I decided to start really inspired writing what I think will become a series of essays or articles about where addiction comes from and and how it came about. But the the book I read is, is a book called The A Brief History of intelligence. The author is max Bennett, and it's described by him as evolution AI, and the five breakthroughs that made our brains. So I didn't actually, when reading this, think that I was going to learn anything about addiction at all, right, I figured that this would just be a book about AI, another topic that I have more than casual interest in. But what I learned, and this is a clever way that he constructed the book, the really big jumps in AI technology that have occurred over the last 40 or 50 years really correspond to moments in time when we learned more about biological intelligence, right? That we that some of the research and investigation and evolutionary biology was teaching us more, not only about how our brains work today, but how some of the simplest, earliest brains work and and how those brains evolved, literally over millions of years of time, in order to become more and more capable, but in doing So, also how our understanding of how intelligence works evolved. Yeah,

DeAnn Knighton:

that's really interesting. I hadn't even thought about the connection between those two things, and it's one of the things that's so interesting about like substance use disorder work and how much has changed in the last 10 years as a result of neuroscience and some of those developments, and what a difference it has made in the way we think about that particular issue. But I didn't even think about how much that would inform the technology side as well. That's really interesting. So what kind of stood out to you as having a connection to the substance use disorder world. Yeah,

Craig Knighton:

it probably makes sense for me to jump in to the essay itself and kind of introduce this to you, but, but what I learned is about some of the earliest and most primitive forms of life and how the problem that needed to be solved. Really, actually, it's it's fascinating. In some cases, animal species evolved in an environment that was rich in food, and those kinds of animals have a very specific shape. They don't have a body plan like ours, where it's sort of a left side, right side, and some symmetrical, but they tend to be round and and they have a mouth, and the food just sort of falls in the mouth, right? And a lot of these animals are actually in water. They evolved in oceans, and as long as they are in a food rich environment, they can be fixed in place, right? And the food just comes to them. If you want to be able to survive where food is scarce, though, life had to come up with a different way of going to the food, right? You couldn't just survive by sitting there and waiting for food to come to you, especially if you want to survive on land instead of in the water. So even though that this, this body plan had already evolved in the water, this sort of left side, right side, and if you think of it, almost like a tube right a body that has a mouth at one end and an exit at the other, and the food moves through. And the thing moves towards the food, and the food comes into the mouth the basic worm, right? So what's cool is that some of those extremely primitive life forms still exist today, so we don't have to wonder what they were like and and try to learn from fossils. How they functioned, we can experiment with actual living organisms that still work that way today. Wow.

DeAnn Knighton:

Yeah, that's cool. Let's get to the meat of your takeaways from that, and then we'll go from there.

Craig Knighton:

The noble nematode being retired means more time to read. And this spring, I read a brief history of intelligence by Max Bennett. I can honestly say that it is my favorite non fiction book ever, and I can't wait to read it again. In it, Max weaves a remarkably elegant narrative, although I have to admit, at times it's quite dense even for me, about how our brains evolved to become what they are today, while at the end of the story, the human mind is, of course, the dramatic climax. That's not what caught my interest. Instead, it was the early evolution of one of the simplest forms of nervous systems, before there were even brains, that sparked my imagination. We understand today that there are lots of reasons why substance use disorders are increasingly common. Access is easier than ever. Life is stressful, and we all look for ways to regulate. Some are predisposed to anxiety or have experienced physical or emotional trauma, and they're just trying to cope. The list is long. Our environment minds and bodies are full of traps, and at times, it seems more appropriate to wonder, do any of us not use something now enter the nematode. This tiny living fossil doesn't even have a brain. In fact, its entire nervous system is made up of only 302 neurons spread throughout its body and along a spinal cord, some of these neurons are used to sense their environment, and together, they allow the nematode to accomplish the first form of intelligence that was needed in animals, the ability to move and to steer towards food. I'm looking at a picture of a nematode right now. It's zoomed way in, but a real nematode, and these still exist today. Are about a millimeter long, small enough that you wouldn't even notice it if you saw one. And they're kind of transparent, so you can see through their bodies. And as I look at this picture, I can tell that there's sort of a spinal cord moving through it, and I can see what looks like a gut, because I'm sure that, like all other worms, it eats food at its mouth, and then it passes along through its body and out the tail end. So why is something like this so primitive and so interesting to me? Because of something that I didn't know that really surprised me. Nematodes are addicts, too,

DeAnn Knighton:

in thinking about this, in this life form, I'm trying to picture this little creature. How do How does one determine if something like that is drunk or impaired in some way?

Craig Knighton:

Right? Well, so ironically, it's not much different than the earliest tests for whether or not you were driving while drunk. Literally, what they can do is observe how the nematode is moving right. They can watch and watch its motion, watch how it's, I guess, sort of wriggling right as it tries to move. And you can see that it changes walking. It's like walking, Yep, yeah, literally can't drive in a straight line, huh? So what, what's interesting about how this relates to intelligence is, if is that substance seeking right or food seeking, being able to get to food really involves two kinds of intelligence. If you will, interacting right you? You need to be able to sense that food is present in your environment and have some idea of its direction. And that's that's why our bodies have a left and right symmetry. It's because we might need to turn left to go to food, or we might need to turn right to go to food, or the food might be right in front of us. And so if we have neurons, like a nematode does, that are very close to in its head and close to its skin, if you will, the outside of its body, it can tell whether there's food to the left, food in front, or food to the right, and its steering is as simple as do. I just keep going straight forward because there's food in front of me? Oh, well, actually, it's even simpler. It starts with this, am I full? The first thing animals need to know is if they're satiated or not, and so if I'm full, if I'm not hungry, they just sit. They don't waste energy by moving. Then when they realize that they're hungry, so they have to have a hunger signal, they start to move towards the food, either sensing that it's to my left, to my right, or right in front of me. And they'll move towards the food until they get blocked by something, and then they'll turn one way or the other, depending. Depending on which side is telling them has more food. Is there more food to the left or more food to the right? And I'll turn in that direction. And so that you can observe them moving this way. You can put food in their environment. You can watch them move towards the food. And you can introduce substances like alcohol into the environment and see how that first appears to be food to them, they move towards the alcohol, but then see that their steering changes once they get into an environment that's rich in alcohol. So just like with humans, right, the first thing you have to do to get addicted to a substance is it has to be in your environment. It has to be around you.

DeAnn Knighton:

Yeah, so how, how does that play into their ability at that point? Do they have, I guess, what you would call the discernment. I know you said that they can sense volume like they can sense if there's more food one way or the other. But what about if there's choices of two types of things? There

Craig Knighton:

are some things that are the opposite of food, that are repellent to them. And so they're able to sense some of those things and move away from something that's dangerous or harmful to them. So maybe it's acidic, maybe I don't remember in the book what the substance was that's negative that they move away from, but they have a positive or negative discernment, that's for sure, and that's what now we're getting at the idea The book describes as valence right this balance the tips to the left or the right. I can't even say in their brain, because they don't have a brain, but there's definitely a bias in their system to I'm going to move to the left or to the right or forward or not at all, depending on all of these neurons and what they're sensing about the environment. And what is just crazy is in the very middle, earliest, oldest parts of our brains that sit right on top of the spinal cord. It works exactly the same way. So

DeAnn Knighton:

these concepts, how did they translate into AI or artificial intelligence? Yeah,

Craig Knighton:

it turns out that this won't surprise you, that it's we don't have to worry about the robot revolution in which the robots take over the world anytime soon, because the problem of thinking or appearing to be thinking, is actually easier than the problem of moving around in the world and building a robot that can sense and understand everything about its environment, and not just think like a human, but act like A human, move like a human, behave like a human in the world. That's a much harder problem to solve. But back to the nematode, right? If you think about that really simple steering mechanism of I go straight until I can't and then I turn one way or the other, depending on which way I think I can sense food. Engineers that were developing and designing some of the first robotic systems that we all know and love, these robots that vacuum our floor for us, right, that move around in a room that they can't even see, that all they can do is vacuum and go forward until they bump into a wall, and then they turn some random amount one way, randomly left or right, and try again and try again until they get out of that that world and continue on in a path that isn't blocked. It turns out that was like the first generations worked that way. But the problem they had was they would eventually run out of power and stop, and just stop running wherever they were because their batteries ran dry. They would run out of food, right? So then they had to solve the problem of, how does it get back to its power station, right, which a nematode doesn't have to do that. It just keeps doesn't have a home that it needs to return to, so it doesn't need to know where it is in the world. So in that case, the these robots, simple robots, have to have a way of finding where the home is. And so they're, they have sensors, and they're, I think they use infrared to be able to find where the battery charger is so it can return to home when it's done heating on the room and go nest and get its battery charged again. And all of this is the same way these simple organisms worked, right? We copied the body plan and the steering mechanism of simple worms like the nematode to develop these vacuum cleaners that run in this semi automated way.

DeAnn Knighton:

So then, how does that translate when you don't have the actual form or the movement in the world, when we're talking. Just about artificial intelligence within our computers. What is the difference there? There

Craig Knighton:

really isn't a difference in how those brains need to function, but they do have to have more perception, right? They have to be able to sense more about the environment. If you think about it, we have five senses. Robots are getting to the point where they can now effectively use listen to sound and see things with cameras, and that's how we can have robots that can do advanced things, like driving cars, where you have all these things in your environment you have to be able to sense and react to. But it's still hard. Like the best example is something you wouldn't even think twice about, right, as a human, your job is to clean up after dinner, and you have a cupboard full of dishes of various shapes and sizes, and you have a sink, and you have to find a dish, and you have to pick it up, and you have to put it under the water, and you have to wash it, and then you have to rinse it, and then you have to dry it, and then you have to put it away. No one's been able to build a robot that can wash dishes. We don't even think twice about it. Doing it as a task, but still to this day, it's an unsolved problem. They break dishes all the time. They they're not smart enough to do a simple, mechanical task like that.

DeAnn Knighton:

This is a little bit off track, but I still think it plays into some of our larger themes around this topic, around the skepticism. But I can't not think about our mom when you are talking about this, because she I just remember this whole situation when we got them a Roomba, our mom and dad as present, oh yeah, and how it was the most fascinating thing to watch. You know, she had spent her life being the vacuumer of the home, right, and the one who made sure that things were in the right place. And there was the level of, not only the level of skepticism, but maybe even a little bit of jealousy that this thing, this would actually be able to do, the thing that she knows how to do, right? Was like, felt very threatening, right? And she was like, very It took her a while to adjust to this thing. And our dad, who has this very mechanical brain, was so into it. He was like, all about the things you were just talking about, like, how does this work, and what's, what's the science behind it, and how it moves through the world. And it was really funny to watch the two of them and the way they reacted to the same thing. Yeah,

Craig Knighton:

anything that strikes too close at your sense of identity or value or worth, right? This is what I do, and this is why the world values me is going to be threatening. There's just no doubt about it. That's

DeAnn Knighton:

right, including a room back. Okay, well, let's maybe dive now into a little bit more of your essay. Okay, humans

Craig Knighton:

are remarkably complex, so much so that it is almost impossible to understand cause and effect in our minds and bodies. We want to understand why some people bend and others break, then we have so many variables to manage that it seems impossible. Our brains have literally trillions of neurons in them. How could you possibly understand what's happening? However, if you wanted to study the processes involved in a simple animal like a nematode with only 300 neurons, then we might be able to understand what happens there and whether these mechanisms are also part of how our more complex nervous systems work. Armed with that new knowledge, perhaps we can develop new treatments as well. There's something else that's interesting and noble about a nematode with substance use disorder. No one would accuse them of having a moral lapse or character failure or a lack of willpower or mental illness, as I said, they don't even have a brain. They don't choose to do anything. They just are and they exist to survive. This behavior is simply a product of their environment, their biology conditioning and their body chemistry and the neural adaptation that tips there, what's called an effective valence. This is even though they don't have a brain, they do have a nervous system, and that nervous system is part of how they seek. So that effective Valence is this, am I sitting still? Am uncomfortable? Am I full? Or am I moving? Because I'm seeking, and I'm seeking, of course, food nematodes also experience their own form of withdrawal when the substance is removed, and behave differently until time allows them to recover and return to a normal or naive state. So what if we could understand what happens in a nematodes body chemistry? And neural pathways during the onset of addiction. What if we could understand the source of withdrawal symptoms and how to relieve them. Would that not only ease the difficult first 30 days, but even make it less likely that someone would relapse? Could we prevent cravings altogether? What if abstinence was not the only way to cure substance use disorder. I don't know about you, but I'd like to know. Yeah,

DeAnn Knighton:

it's so interesting for me to hear all of this. And the one thing I keep thinking about is, and I haven't thought of it before, until today. So thanks for opening up some different channels of thought. But I'm thinking about the fact that we consume alcohol even though it doesn't have any value to our body. Obviously, there's a drive to it, we know, and it impacts our brain in a different way, but it's not because of trying to meet any of our physiological needs. And so I'm wondering how this translates, in this case, with a more simpler life form like this, and how that shows up. Yeah,

Craig Knighton:

so what I found myself thinking about was how clever addiction is in hijacking the literally the most important circuit in life finding food, right? There is no more important thing to survival for an animal with our body plan than to be able to move towards food. And yet, this is exactly the thing that gets hijacked by substance use disorder, right? You begin to seek that substance, perhaps to the exclusion of food, you have a preference towards finding it. Actually, I'll push back a little bit at DeAnn. Alcohol has calories. It is food, right? And so moving towards alcohol is a way of getting calories. And if you were in a really sparse environment that had no calories anywhere except for alcohol, you could survive on alcohol for a period of time. So it, it, it's subtle, right? In fact, I think it's true that all of these substances represent one of two things being hijacked, either the food circuit, right, as a survival mechanism, or the pleasure circuit, which is closely related to food, right? There is a lot of what you're doing when you're pleasure seeking as well, is just trying to get sated again. You You have become uncomfortable, and you want to get comfortable again. And so you move to work, move in the world, to go get something that's going to regulate you and make you sated again. And that might be food or it might be a substance. Yeah,

DeAnn Knighton:

you know, I was having dinner with a nine year old this week, and this is just my favorite moment of the week to share. So I'm glad that we have a reason I get to share it. But we were waiting for our food, and it was taking a really long time. And I've never heard her say anything like this before, so it just felt very authentic, you know? And she just looked at me and she said, I can't tell if I'm hungry or bored. I loved it so much, right? Because for all of this work I've done on this topic, we go into Wait what is really happening with the entirety of our system, including our emotional system as well, and how we're feeling. I

Craig Knighton:

love that story, because, in a way, that is one of the things that makes us different than the nematode, right? A nematode would never move because it was bored. It would never try to entertain itself by moving because that would just be a waste of energy. But our rich, complex brains absolutely would do that. We would just be bored sitting like, Okay, I'm full. I don't need anything. I'm just gonna sit here. I can't imagine how boring that would be. And if you think about it, what if most people do in that situation, they get up and move. They get up and move to escape the boredom, right?

DeAnn Knighton:

When you think of what you've learned from this and where you would want to take it next, what does it open up for you in your mind, in terms of areas you would want to continue to explore?

Craig Knighton:

Right? Yeah, a couple of things. The first is just, I'm struck with the idea that if someone isn't studying addiction and nematodes, they should be right. Somebody should be trying to figure out exactly what is happening with those 302 neurons, and how does this idea of a valence in the thing that doesn't even have a brain, but where you can think of it as like just their world is tipped towards wherever that substance is, and when they move, they're going to move to that substance in the world. That's so similar to what it would look like if you were an alien, watching a human from space, a human who is addicted to a substance, and watching them move around in the world, it would look like, holy cow, that that. Thing down there just can't get away from that stuff. It is going to find it, no matter how well hidden it is or how hard it is to get to in the world. So that's the first thing, this. The second thing, I think is interesting, is to now try to map what you understand is happening at a physical level, around steering into our complicated brains in humans, and trying to understand how this becomes behavior in a different way. And that's actually one of the topics I'll dive into in a in a later conversation with you. I I've realized that there's something kind of funny that I do that definitely represents me moving through the world in order to seek a substance that I'm very fond of, sugar. And so I want to, next time we talk about this, I want to tell you more about how I've realized I am behaving and how clever My mind is in fooling me into thinking that I have legitimate and honest reasons to end up in a place that has wonderful sugar available to me,

DeAnn Knighton:

right? And how the brain can focus on trying to find that one reason, and then that becomes like the priority, in a way, when I think of the nine year old statement of, Am I hungry or am I bored, right? This is what all of this boils down to, in terms of counseling and therapy and working with people on this topic. Is that dialectical thinking of both, right? Maybe it's both. Maybe you are hungry, maybe you are bored. Do we know how much one is driving your behavior more than the other is, is there a percentage on all of the different reasons, you know? Or if we're thinking about addiction, biological component, environmental component, access, right? It's almost like if you look at it like a pie and trying to figure out how much of each thing is contributing, it really becomes almost impossible to do on an individual level, and we work to control as many of the Levers as we can to create the outcome that is going to hopefully drive that person towards health and well Being and whatever works best for them. But there's there. It's difficult to really get at the science of of how to balance those things. Well,

Craig Knighton:

let me end with this quick analogy, because you use the word balance several times there, and that's exactly what a valence is about, right? Or a bias or a balance, right? So wouldn't it be great if when we didn't need anything, our balance was to be content and and I would just sit here and be happy? Wouldn't that be something, right? And in a lot of ways, I think we all try to seek that. People who meditate are trying to accomplish that state, right? They don't need to move in order to try to scratch some itch. So the metaphor I'm left with, all the way back to the nematode right, is, what if your brain, if you think of your brain as this flat surface and there's a ball on top of it, and if you tip that just a little bit in a direction that thing's going to start to move right, and it's going to pick up speed, and it's going to actually move in the world towards whatever it's tipped towards right. So I think that's a great metaphor for addiction that and it's tied to moving. I don't think you could become addicted if you couldn't move, okay? I You have to be able to move towards a substance. And then once you become acclimated to or adjust accustomed to that substance being present, and it becomes part of your reward system, now you're going to more actively seek it. And that that tipped board right is the addiction metaphor. For me, it's everything about your mental state being unfortunately tipped in the direction of I bet you could think of 1000 different reasons why you would get up and move right now. But if you do, you're going to move towards the substance. Oh,

DeAnn Knighton:

wow, yeah, wow, that's really interesting. Thanks so much for bringing this My pleasure. We'll definitely continue to have more on related to some of these topics as we go as for now, I hope you have a great

Craig Knighton:

day. Thanks, Dean. Thanks everyone. You.