#fivebooks — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

From an article about addiction books (https://fivebooks.com/best-books/the-best-addiction-books-carl-erik-fisher) in https://fivebooks.com:

“But before Bruce [Alexander]’s studies, there was a long behaviourist tradition of putting rats in cages, and then you could very easily addict a rat to morphine by letting them press a lever. They would use it compulsively, in the sense that it crowded out other rewards, even food. But Bruce said, ‘That’s a little artificial. Rats don’t live in cages. Rats live out in the wild. So what if I built an enormous cage that had lots of toys, opportunities to socialize, opportunities to mate?’ He even painted little pine trees on the walls and put nice wood chips on the ground. And he found that it was impossible to addict rats to opioids under the traditional behavioural paradigm when there are alternative reinforcers available.”

This explains a lot about the world we live in. 🐀

#Rats #Addiction #Psychology #Opioids #WarOnDrugs #LifeQuality #FiveBooks