Addictions are serious chronic brain diseases, which have biological, psychological, and social implications. They are powerful because they employ neurological processes required for learning and survival. However, they use these vital systems in a way that threatens the addict's health, relationships, and may often end in criminal prosecution and jail time. So, to understand and treat this problem both the patient and the counselor must know how abuse is encoded, triggered, and reinforced.
Our brain participates in a two-level learning system. Generally, learning can be divided into short-term and long-term with each using very different and distinct parts of the brain - and one critical part that both share. The ability to have short-term memory involves perception being predominantly stored in the area called the hippocampus, which specializes in briefly recording what is detected by one's senses. This then tends to trigger a reaction in the nearby amygdala, which is the brain's emotional center. The resulting reaction varies depending on whether the perception is deemed to cause pleasure or fear. Of course, I would assume that addictive behavior is more related to a pleasurable response. This acts as a reward system, which is critical to our ability to encode and reinforce the proper reaction to a perception of safety or threat.
