This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How Stuff Works.com.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Julie Douglas.

Julie has returned to us from New York City once more. It's true. And you have returned from laryngitisville. Yes, yes, for the most part. Yeah, yeah, you're there. Yes, when I was in New York, I attended the World Science Festival, which if you guys have never heard about it, you should immediately, well, after this episode, check it out because they have some online offerings that are wonderful.

But when I was there, I checked out this panel on something called the craving brain.

And that's what we're going to talk about today, this idea of what addiction is and what it is not.

So it's about the craving brain, not craving brains.

Not the, yeah, no zombie content, as far as I know, is going to tumble forth from our

lips today.

Because it's my understanding, if you showed up for this talk expecting a lighthearted

discussion about zombies, you would have been pretty disappointed.

And so that's what we're discussing in this episode, addiction, the science of addiction.

And it's really fascinating this topic because for me, I had not really looked into it before.

I had, I wouldn't say just a surface level understanding of addiction.

Like I was privy to some of the science and some of the levels of deeper understanding

involved in addiction research.

But still, it's so misunderstood at large in our culture, even today.

Yeah, and I feel like we are only now getting a baseline understanding of it.

And a lot of that has to do with the brain itself.

We talk about this all the time.

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