Shep Siegel conducted ingenious experiments in the 1970s demonstrating that drug tolerance in rats is largely if not entirely due to Pavlovian conditioning: The experienced drug user responds to indicators that a dose is imminent with physiological counter-responses that lessen the impact of the drug. Almost from the get-go, Siegel saw the potential relevance of his research to aspects of addiction, withdrawal, and relapse in human beings, but it has taken addiction researchers decades to assimilate the implications, which are profound. Now retired, Siegel has written a highly readable retrospective account of this story which I found utterly convincing, and it should turn on light-switches in the head of anyone who has ever dealt with addiction, whether mild or severe, in one's self or in a family member or friend.
How withdrawal distress and cravings can haunt current and former addicts, and what they can teach us about addiction and its treatments.
“The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house,” Jean Cocteau once wrote. In The Ghost in the Addict, Shepard Siegel offers a Pavlovian analysis of drug use. Chronic drug use, he explains, conditions users to have an anticipatory homeostatic correction, which protects the addict from overdose. This drug-preparatory response, elicited by drug-paired cues, is often mislabeled a “withdrawal response.” The withdrawal response, however, is not due to the baneful effects of previous…
Sarah Hrdy is a biological anthropologist best known for her discovery that male monkeys sometimes promote their own reproductive success by killing infants sired by rival predecessors, and for her subsequent scholarly syntheses of knowledge about the care and protection of young children by mothers and "others" which mainly means their grandmothers and other female kin. As a result of witnessing caring young fathers in her own family, Hrdy now says she's experienced a sort of epiphany. She was formerly convinced that people, like many other mammals, had been equipped by evolution with profound sex differences in parental motives and emotions. She no longer believes that, and now seeks to explain why women and men are more equipotential than she thought. You needn't be convinced that she's sorted it all out (neither is she) in order to enjoy her skillful blending of autobiography, history, primatology, and neuroscience.
A sweeping account of male nurturing, explaining how and why men are biologically transformed when they care for babies
It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things. Hasn't it always been so? When evolutionary science came along, it rubber-stamped this venerable division of labor: mammalian males evolved to compete for status and mates, while females were purpose-built to gestate, suckle, and otherwise nurture the victors' offspring. But come the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of men are tending babies, sometimes right from birth. How can this be happening? Puzzled and dazzled by the tender…
Daniel Nettle is a rare social scientist: he writes beautifully and exceptionally clearly, and he is a fine interdisciplinary scholar who treats his predecessors with all the respect that they deserve (and no more). In this book, published in 2015, he summarized years of multi-methods research by himself and several collaborators bearing on the questions of how and why the social lives and attitudes of people in an affluent versus a deprived neighbourhood in the same city (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) are vastly different. Every reader will have intuitions about these issues and some of those intuitions will be borne out. But there is no-one who wouldn't learn a great deal from this book, and Nettle does not shy away from asking whether there are practical policy implications of his findings. Social research at its best!
Nettle's book presents the results of five years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in two different neighbourhoods of the same British city, Newcastle upon Tyne. The neighbourhoods are only a few kilometres apart, yet whilst one is relatively affluent, the other is amongst the most economically deprived in the UK. Tyneside Neighbourhoods uses multiple research methods to explore social relationships and social behaviour, attempting to understand whether the experience of deprivation fosters social solidarity, or undermines it. The book is distinctive in its development of novel quantitative methods for ethnography: systematic social observation, economic games, household surveys, crime statistics, and field…
Economic inequality (imperfectly indexed as income inequality) has been found to be the best single predictor of variability in homicide rates at scales ranging from comparisons across nations to comparisons between neighborhoods. The likeliest explanation is that a more inequitable distribution of resources provokes more competition, including the sort of dangerous interpersonal competition that can turn lethal. Beneficiaries of inequality often dislike suggestions that a more equitable economic redistribution would have benefits, and attacks have been mounted against both the reality described in the preceding paragraph's first sentence, and the interpretation offered in its second. This book is a refutation of those attacks..
