If you used a brain scanner to look at a person who has been recently broken up with, and then you used the same brain scanner to look at someone who recently sobered up from an addictive drug, their brain activity would be very similar.
How do you know? To me that sentence raises “neurobabble” warning signs.
Addiction isn’t the only thing that happens in that part of the brain, and that isn’t the only part of the brain that is active. But the addiction/craving similarity is the most useful metaphor for someone going through a break up because it emphasizes that wanting something very strongly is not the same thing as it being good for you, and getting what you want does not make the wanting go away.
You are right, though, that paragraph is pretty neurobabbley. I have a tendency to use a lot of unnecessary jargon so I try to reduce it as much as possible. And also, this is my first post on LessWrong. Should I edit above?
How do you know? To me that sentence raises “neurobabble” warning signs.
Here are a couple of the papers I saw that described this similarity:
http://jn.physiology.org/content/104/1/51.short (small sample size, I know)
http://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/jaap.2011.39.4.737
http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/298373
Not quite the same but similar: http://www.forensis.org/PDF/published_29.pdf
Addiction isn’t the only thing that happens in that part of the brain, and that isn’t the only part of the brain that is active. But the addiction/craving similarity is the most useful metaphor for someone going through a break up because it emphasizes that wanting something very strongly is not the same thing as it being good for you, and getting what you want does not make the wanting go away.
You are right, though, that paragraph is pretty neurobabbley. I have a tendency to use a lot of unnecessary jargon so I try to reduce it as much as possible. And also, this is my first post on LessWrong. Should I edit above?
I’m not sure about whether you should edit your text, but citations and/or footnotes would be a good idea.
edit above! Most people don’t mind edits; just write