High Price

stick out most in my mind. There were many others, some one-night stands, some longer-term friend-girls. As I mentioned earlier, the mother of my son Tobias was a girl whom I’d gotten with only once.
    In terms of sex, then, my adolescence was not one of deprivation. I certainly don’t say this to brag. Sexual fidelity and infidelity are a matter of conflict in every society. Here I’d just like to make clear that my relationships with women sustained me emotionally and buoyed me up when I wasn’t getting the nurture and encouragement I needed at home.
    I will also note parenthetically that my experience shows that you can become a scientist without having been socially inept as a kid. Unlike many of my lab mates, I did not sit at home, fantasizing about unapproachable girls in tight jeans who were oblivious to my existence. I wasn’t the science geek alone with my books or the dork who couldn’t even talk to a lady. I didn’t spend hours with pornography. Indeed, I was so sexually active that some media “experts” might even have called me a “sex addict.”
    But that wasn’t quite what was going on. Instead, my experience illustrates the problems with reducing complex human behavior to simplistic terms like addiction and with trying to blame specific brain chemicals for people’s actions. Doing so fails to consider the context under which the behavior occurs. It also places an unwarranted emphasis on coming up with a brain explanation, when carefully understanding the behavior and its context could be much more useful in explaining and altering it.
    My behavior with girls reflected not just biology but context and experience. It was not just pure sex drive (though that was certainly there) but sex drive modulated by my social context, including family expectations and neighborhood norms. It was about my desire to be cool, the local concepts of cool and how I interpreted them. It was about the rules I internalized—such as the idea that masturbation wasn’t manly—as well as the ones that I didn’t. It was frankly, also, about a need for comfort and contact. While science must reduce complexity in order to conduct studies, the interpretation of that data cannot simply then be extrapolated back without recognizing these and other relevant caveats.
    As a neuroscientist, however, I didn’t recognize this at first and I think many of my colleagues still have difficulty doing so. When I started my career, there was great excitement around a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which was believed to explain why people got addicted to drugs. It was even seen as driving behaviors like the propensity for sexual variety. Indeed, some people seemed to believe it could account for all forms of desire and pleasure. And at first, I, too, thought dopamine could answer these kinds of questions. Recognizing why it cannot be the sole answer is an important part of developing a more sophisticated and productive way of understanding how drugs affect behavior and consequently, how to develop better ways to treat addiction.
    T he green blips on the oscilloscope were coming fast and furious. Poppoppoppoppop was the sound accompanying the images, which were generated by the firing of neurons in a region of the rat brain called the nucleus accumbens. I was monitoring the experiment, studying the effects of morphine or nicotine on these brain cells. Previously, I’d operated on the rat, delicately implanting electrodes into the accumbens to measure the way the neurons there would react to the drugs. Although we couldn’t tell directly using this technique, we believed we were studying cells that used dopamine as their neurotransmitter, since these were the most common type of cell in that brain area.
    It was 1990. I was an eager young college student, working at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. President George H. W. Bush had labeled that year as the start of the decade of the brain. Dopamine was at the center of addiction research. Researchers like Roy Wise and George Koob had propounded the theory that all psychoactive drugs that people enjoy—everything from alcohol to cocaine to heroin—increased the activity of dopamine neurons in this region. 1 This was believed to cause intense pleasure, which in turn produced desire for more.
    And, in the case of drug use, that desire was said to be so overwhelming as to “hijack” the brain’s “pleasure center,” a major part of which is known as the nucleus