The Neuroscience of Addiction (Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology)

Addiction isn't "a new" thing. Since the effects of addiction can tear through time and ripple across generations, understanding addiction is critical. This book is not so much a "here's how to treat addictions," book, but a "here's what we know about why it happens" book. The author mentions different neural circuits in the brain, data for relapse rates for different addictions, genetic, sex, and age influences that can tilt the scales to make people more likely to become addicts. The author differentiates between sensation seeking and impulsivety, which is crucial to understand addictions.

Love the content. It adds a valuable perspective.

Book has wealth of information to understand addiction. more geared to those with medical backgtound

Easy to read, with references and questions for practicing. Nice for people who needs a easygoing read about drug addiction and brain neuro circuitry implicated

The topics presented are current and the fundamentals of neuroscience covered sufficiently to synthesize concepts.

This is a pretty good book, albeit one with probably a fairly restricted audience. The introduction says it was written for students or intelligent and interested members of the general public, and that seems about right for the level of technical detail at which it’s written. Most members of the reading public will find it slightly too technical to understand. Though it does take some time to explain things like the basics of a variety of neural imaging techniques work, readers who aren’t already familiar with neuroanatomy, physiology, and a variety of neuroscience terms will likely find the book indecipherable. And probably also of fairly little interest because the book isn’t a self-help book about dealing with addition, doesn’t make any particular political points, and is instead an attempt at providing an objective look at how addiction manifests inside the physical brain. A chapter dedicated to studies concerned with treating addiction is present but is similarly focused on surveying the (admittedly limited) literature rather than giving actionable advice for members of the public. If one is a practicing doctor—or even a graduate student specializing in a related field—on the other hand, one will find its treatment of the subject, while interesting enough, to be fairly light and superficial. Each of the book’s ten short chapters could easily have merited an entire book (or perhaps even a multi-volume series) on its own, so we have to be content with treating this as a fairly quick survey of the literature. But if one is an undergraduate (or perhaps early graduate) student possessed of some familiarity with neuroscience but who has been disappointed by the superficial treatments given to addiction in most textbooks, this book might be something of a godsend because it condenses the literature fairly well. More importantly, the bibliographies following each chapter are, themselves, treasure troves of the kind of research such students might be looking for. The book does acknowledge that there are different kinds of addictions than just to substances, licit or otherwise. For instance, individuals can become addicted to gambling, pornography, social media, many things. However, after acknowledging these variants, the book largely ignores them, focusing on substance addictions. That’s not necessarily a flaw—books do need to be focused on their own topics, after all—but it would have been helpful had the author taken a bit more time to let the reader know at least which of the principles discussed are more or less likely to apply to different kinds of addiction and which are limited specifically to substance abuse. Similarly, the book acknowledges to a certain extent the cognitive and behavioral sides of addiction, particularly when discussing Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy as one among several interventions that have shown some promise in treating addiction. However, while an emphasis on neuroscience alone makes sense within a book on neuroscience, the author goes a step too far in dismissing the more purely social or psychological elements of addiction as irrelevant at best and misconceptions at worst. Treating addiction as a purely medical issue without any thought given to the individual’s own character or the social milieu seems, shall we say, misguided. However, this can mostly be forgiven as such statements are relatively rare and don’t detract from the book’s higher-quality treatment of the legitimately medical aspects of the issue. All in all, a pretty good if slightly flawed and too-short introduction to a very complicated topic, suitable for interested students.

too much testing material and not enough real neuroscience

The Introduction mentions this book was written in part for a general audience, interested in the science of addiction, as well as for undergraduates "in pre-med" and other specializations that have elements of neuroscience. For that reason, and because of how brief this work is relative to its cost, I'm rating this as 3 stars. The information provided is good and fairly detailed in some areas, but ultimately you could write a full book's worth on any one of the topics here and not charge the ~ $35 for it. Ultimately the format and the depth of information is roughly equivalent to having a chapter added to a college textbook, specific to addiction, but covering each point — is it a social issue or a pathology, basic brain pathways affected, craving, withdrawal, etc — at a summary level. For students and researchers though, the cost may be justified just by virtue of the "further reading" section that accompanies each short chapter. There's a lot of homework that's been done here, sussing out articles on specific addiction topics from medical and scientific journals over the last 10-15 years worth. So my recommendation is, if you're taking a college class that requires some knowlege of addiction and its mechanisms, and how it's studied, but your current text doesn't offer much, this will be a useful addition. But for general readers on books about the science of addiction, you will probably be better off buying two or three more specialized general audience or science books, and paying the same $35 for those, than by reading this book.

Very good book, definitely recommend for people that they just want to study it (beginners) and university students. It got me through very well within my assessment research and gave me an excellent understanding of addiction. I could easily say that this was one of my favourite books to read.

Das Thema wird umfassend und wohl auf aktuellem Stand beschrieben..... für meine Vorbereitungen sehr wertvoll

Satisfying step toward my urge for knowing process of addiction, changes happened in brain due to substance use. Book is more about brain structure, medical terms, brain anatomy which is helpful for people with non medical background for learning about addiction beyond social / behavioral causes. Interesting to know, there is different tendencies of addiction and dopamine release in female and male brains on substances use.

I have often been disappointed at fine neuroscience texts having little or no content of addictions or severe mental illnesses. This book is a rare treatment of the biological sciences of addiction. It is complete, comprehensive and reasonably up to date. It would be fair to say there is more knowledge that just 20 years ago, but much to be discovered. I had to reread chapters. This is not a criticism. The chapters are short and meaty. My neuroscience knowledge is a bit stale as I discovered. A knowledge of basic neuroscience is helpful, but not necessary to learn from this book. A textbook for a course in the neuroscience of addiction, I only wish Francesca Filbey would do an on-line course at some point for those of us around the world who would benefit from it.