A new paper offers a deeply thought-provoking perspective on the nature of addiction and how mental disorders can exist without brain diseases.
The article, from Jerome Wakefield, contains several lines of argument. One of them is an analogy, which I liked so much that I’m going to turn it into a story to start this post:
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Once there was a newborn goose, fresh from the egg.
This young gosling, like all geese, was born with a biological mission: to imprint on something. Imprinting is an instinctive mechanism by which hatchlings learn to follow the first thing they set eyes on.
Normally, the first thing a newborn goose sees is its mother. But our hatchling is unlucky. At the very moment our gosling first opens her eyes, a fox happens to be walking past. Our young bird immediately imprints on the fox.
The rest of the brood did not see ...
