Good afternoon, everyone. It's Dr. Niagara again with our next episode of Psychology Unplugged.

As always, great talking to a lot of you guys over the past week via email.

People reaching out through psychology today, being able to talk to people about different career paths in the field of psychology, neuropsychology.

So, again, absolute pleasure and privileged to people to do this every week and share the knowledge that I have.

And Julie will be joining me for this episode today.

So today's topic is addiction.

Now, addiction tends to be synonymous with substance abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse, both.

But addiction crosses over many levels of human behavior, sexual addiction, gambling addiction, religious addiction,

um, addiction is not something when somebody engages in a particular behavior sets out to pursue.

When somebody becomes addicted, it's the result of engaging in repeated behaviors independent of

the appropriateness or inappropriateness, healthy or unhealthy,

positive, negative implications that behavior has.

And the brain structure involved in addiction is the mesolimbic dopaminergic system. And dopamine

is our pleasure neurotransmitter. It's produced by a structure in the brain called the

substantia nigra. And if you actually look at the structure when I did my neurodanimity classes,

the structure actually looks black my neurod anatomy classes the structure actually

looks black and it literally means black substance and this is what drives us to continue to

engage in any types of behavior over and over again so if I I engage in behavior A, whatever that is,

and I like the environmental, emotional,

cognitive response from that,

I am much more likely to re-engage in that behavior again.

Now, you can get to a point where you continue to reengage where it does

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