A few days ago on the Dean Edell radio show, I’m told, Dean Edell told his listeners that nicotine patches don’t cause any addiction problems; people just don’t get addicted to them. To anyone who has read The Shangri-La Diet this will sound eerily familiar: Dr. William Jacobs, a professor of psychiatry and addiction researcher at the University of Florida, told me that no one gets addicted to unflavored sugar water, although lots of people get addicted to Coke, Pepsi, and other forms of flavored sugar water.
These examples suggest is that it isn’t the drug (sugar, nicotine) that causes addiction, it’s the signal of the drug — the conditioned stimulus (CS), to use animal-learning jargon. No signal, no addiction. In the case of sugar water, it’s very clear: Digestion of calories provides little or no pleasure. Ingestion of sweet-tasting things provides just a little pleasure. Ingestion of a flavor that has been paired with calories many times, such as the flavor of Coke, provides a lot of pleasure. The pattern with nicotine may be similar: Nicotine itself provides little or no pleasure. It is learned signals of nicotine — events repeated followed by nicotine — that can be very pleasant.
The practical application is that you may not need nicotine patches to quit smoking. It may be enough to hold your nose while you smoke. (The nose-clipping that SLD forum readers are familiar with.) When you smoke, the smell may become the CS. With this way of smoking you could have cigarettes whenever you wanted. You’d just come to want them less and less.
Likewise, it may be possible to get rid of an addiction to coffee by holding your nose while you drink it.
Thanks to Carl Willat.
What’s the CS for injected heroin?
The situation — the place, the injection details, maybe music and smells at the time. Shepard Siegel, a psychology professor at McMaster University, and his colleagues did a study that showed that many heroin addicts who die of “overdoses” actually die because they changed the CS. Without the right CS, they lost their tolerance and a dose that was formerly tolerable became deadly.
taste is governed by the shape of the molecules, whereas smell is governed by the vibration (i.e., the number of electrons). See, Luca Turin (who has published a book on this, as well as Chandler Burr, who wrote “Emperor of scent etc.. (which is about Turin).
I’m not sure what to make of this and am just presenting it for you to consider. As a layman, i would think that smell may be a stronger stimulus than taste. But clearly, the two are different.
It’s likely that smell can be a CS, but not taste, at least not pure taste. Because you’d only have a few possible signals (6?). Whereas there are thousands of possible smells.
Should be easy enough to test the idea with caffein addiction. Google for “caffeinated water”.
sweet, salty, sour, and bitter; A fifth taste, umami; (from answer.com)
It’s not clear to me why taste cannot be a cs; because there are so few of them?
Sugar has no smell; certain oils have no smell; i suppose that makes sense. i don’t know if you could find anything that was either bitter or sour that did not have a smell.
i’m just musing.
right, taste makes a poor CS because there are so few of them. Lotta confusion — one bitter thing has calories, another bitter thing does not. You need delicate machinery to distinguish thousands of potential foods; and to have delicate machinery it has to be in a safe place (the nose), not in direct contact with pieces of the outside world (the mouth).
I have no sense of smell, yet a can taste things quite well, and can distinguish various foods with my eyes closed that other people who have on noseclips and eyes closed can’t see to do.
I’ve read that something like 10% of people have no sense of smell. I’m just wondering how not having a sense of smell plays into this whole CS idea.
The conventional thing I’ve always heard is that having no sense of small means I should not be able to taste things very well, but my experience is the opposite – I am very tuned in to how things taste.
I just have NO sense of smell at all (and have no idea why – have been this way since childhood – I had a head injury when I was a baby and have always wondered if that may have caused it).
Judy, are you addicted to smoking or coffee?
I’m just musing also, but I was reminded of something when I read this idea.
See, a lot of smokers, if not all, report that they don’t yearn that much for smoking when they have catched a flu [1]. Most say that cigarettes “don’t taste” good when they’re in flu. People tend to attribute this to the condition, say, to a slight fever; that it just doesn’t taste the same when you’re a bit sick. But in a usual flu, your smell is severely impaired. You’re nose is typically congested with liquid (that I cannot find an English word for) and you can’t pretty much smell at all.
Also, the taste aspect of smoking has always seemed somehow over-emphasized. Smokers tend to “speak of a taste of a good cigarette” although everyone seems to think that the nicotine is what they’re after. Furthermore, every smoker who has stopped smoking for more than a month, reports that the taste of the first cigarette after the break is awful, but that will pass usually pretty soon. (After a day or two.)
Just make things clear: would it be the case that a smoker’s brain associates the smell of cigarette with those rare occasions of a real nicotine high (most of the cigarettes a typical smoker has during the day don’t cause any physical feeling whatsoever)?
(By the way, I personally have been a smoker, but this is not just something I’ve noticed in myself.)
[1] I’m not quite sure how the terminology is in English. By flu, I don’t mean some aggressive high-fever Influenza that puts you in bed. Just a regular flu with perhaps a slight fever and snivel coming out of your nose. (I don’t if “snivel” is just the right word, but I hope you understood.)
Maybe Judy has the smell equivalent of blindsight.
I wonder how this insight on addiction could apply to other, non-substance forms of addiction, like video games or internet or shopping or gambling.