It is not a moral failing. It is not a lack of willpower. It is what happens when the brain's most powerful learning system is hijacked by the most potent stimulus it has ever encountered.
Every year, addiction kills millions of people - through overdose, through the diseases it causes, through the accidents and suicides it facilitates. It destroys families, careers, and communities on a scale that makes it one of the largest public health emergencies in the world. And for most of recorded history, the response to it has been shaped not by science but by shame - by the conviction that addiction is a choice, and that the appropriate response to bad choices is punishment.
The neuroscience says otherwise.
In this urgent, evidence-based account - the fifth and final book in The Neuroscience Series - Nathan K. Voss draws on five decades of reward neuroscience to explain precisely what addiction is, how it develops, why it is so difficult to stop, and what the science has established about how it can be overcome.
Spanning ten chapters across four parts, this book covers: