Rat Park

Uh, what? This is the definition of science.

> Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary proofs. That mice wouldn't become addicted to morphine is most certainly an extraordinary claim.

So says you. Also, extraordinary claims require the same proof as any other claim, that oft cited quote makes no sense. Labeling something 'extraordinary' inherently shows that you have a bias, not the person questioning the claim.

This is backwards, our brains are us.

>>We lose focus, even when we really want to concentrate.

This is a microcosm of the dangers involved, in modifying brain chemistry. Consider things like hyperfocus or working straight on amphetamine leading to shit code.

>>Our brains operate suboptimal because we can not control their state.

Many of the things you want can be achieved well by a machine or somebody without emotion? Do we want this?

>>Your premise that people should be forced to be unnecessarily unsatisfied because some of them might go on to do great things is cruel.

Its hard to decouple satisfaction from drive, and willpower - we have rather blunt instruments and current drugs build real dependency problems making it almost impossible to stop. Today's drugs don't do what you are talking about.

It turned out that the subordinate monkeys were much more susceptible to the temptations of cocaine. In contrast, the dominant ones were able to resist its allure a lot more effectively.

The researchers also looked at the neurobiology of the monkeys. Before being socially housed, they were kept in individual cages for a couple of years. They looked at the main pleasure centre of the brain and measured the level of dopamine receptors (of the D2 type) present there. These receptors are directly stimulated by naturally occurring rewards like social activity, food, sex, and so on - but also stimulant drugs like cocaine.

All the monkeys had pretty much the same D2 receptor level when they were cooped up in single cages, with little variation. But when they were socially housed, the D2 levels of the dominant monkeys rose significantly higher; this too was associated with their lessened vulnerability to cocaine.

So it seemed that social environment can have quite the effect on the neurobiology of one's reward pathway, and potential for drug abuse (as the Rat Park experiment suggested).

On reward pathways - in human stimulant addicts you also see lower D2 receptor levels than in non-addicts [2], although this is lacking a comparative reading from before they were addicted, so we don't know if that's near the state they were in when they started abusing the drug. Having said that, in non-addicts there is a natural variation in D2 receptor levels, and those with less D2 enjoy stimulants a lot more [3], just like the subordinate, lower D2 receptor monkeys.

Unlike Rat Park, however, all the above is based on stimulants, which directly affect the aforementioned receptors. Whereas morphine takes a more indirect route, with different receptor types, so it's not quite comparable. Still, interesting to think about how much we may be slaves to our neurobiology, and our social surroundings.

[1] doi:10.1038/nn798

[2] doi:10.1177/026988119901300406

[3] doi:10.1176/ajp.156.9.1440

It's interesting to note that the criticism of the Rat Park experiment uses exactly the same reasoning Rat Park designers used against self-administering experiment, namely that one of seemingly innocuous parts of experimental setup (isolation and genetic variance respectively) was causing a major results bias.

Or rather of any study trying to deduce from rats onto humans. And that's not to say that rats have a non-complicated society.