American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013, Page 483.
“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.”
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.
“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%”
Alexander BK. Addiction: The view from Rat Park. 2010. Online article available from www.brucekalexander.com.
“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?”
Alexander BK. The Globalization of Addiction: A study in poverty of the spirit. 2008, Oxford University Press, New York. Page 195.]
“ ’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.”
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).
“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.”
Alexander BK. The Globalization of Addiction: A study in poverty of the spirit. 2008, Oxford University Press, New York. Pages 193-195.]
[Alexander notes that in some studies, the lab-caged rats consumed nearly twenty times as much morphine as those living in Rat Park.]
Lewis M, et al. Animal models of restricted repetitive behavior in autism. Behavioural Brain Research, 2000, 176, 66-74. Page 68.
“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.”
Wickens CL, Heleski CR. Crib-biting behavior in horses: A review. Applied Animal Behavior Science, 2010, 128, 1-9.
“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.” … [Horses fall into such stereotypical, repetitive behaviors 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.”
O’Leary J. Controlling the wind sucker. Article posted on website of Australian horseman John O’Leary, dated 2003.
“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.”
Quammen D. Contagious Cancer: The evolution of a killer. Harper’s Magazine, April 2008, 33-43.
“How does any parasite, whether it is a species or merely a tumor, acquire the attributes and tactics necessary for survival, reproduction, and continuing success? The answer is simple but not obvious: evolution.” [Page 38]
“Sometimes a single atavistic cell would ignore the collective imperative; it would revert to the old habit—proliferating wildly, disregarding all signals to stop. It would swell into a big, greedy lump of its own kind, and in so doing disrupt one or more of the necessary collective functions. That was cancer. The risk of runaway cell replication remained a factor in the evolutionary process, even as multicellular creatures increased vastly in complexity, diversity, size, and dominance on our planet.” [Page 41]
University of California – Berkeley. Two-step process leads to cell immortalization and cancer: Clearer view of the role telomere length and telomerase play in cell immortalization. Science Daily, August 17, 2017.
[As reported by cancer researcher Kunitoshi Chiba and colleagues at the University of California, the telomerase enzyme is a normal component of cells that] “keeps chromosomes healthy in cells that divide frequently. The enzyme lengthens the caps, or telomeres, on the ends of chromosomes, which wear off during each cell division.”
Dehaene S and Naccache L. Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: Basic evidence and a workspace framework. Cognition, 2001, 79, 1-37. Pages 12-13.
“High-level processes may operate unconsciously, as long as they are associated with functional neural pathways either established by evolution, laid down during development, or automated by learning. Hence, there is no systematic relation between the objective complexity of a computation and the possibility of its preceding unconsciously… Conversely, computationally trivial but non-automatized operations… require conscious effort.”