Classical Conditioning & Overdosing on Heroin

Right - clearly Learning is the area of Psychology that really spins my head around 360 degrees, because as I sat in today's lecture about Classic Conditioning (again, I know - will it ever stop?) one year after I last posted on here I thought, "holy shit, that's freaking amazing! I want to have another crack at this blog thing". So here I am.

The fact that the title of this post has the word 'heroin' in it probably goes some of the way to explaining why I'm back here. And yes, I'm going to explain exactly what my lecturer told me the connection was between Classical Conditioning and overdosing on heroin. 

But before I get to the classical conditioning I have to explain a bit about drug tolerance. 

Drug tolerance occurs when your body get's use to your drug of choice - in this case heroin, but think also nicotine or even caffeine - and it takes more and more of that drug to produce the same results that it used to. This is why addicts start to use more and more heroin (or drink more and more cups of coffee). What's happening inside the body is that you are releasing more chemicals that counteract the drug that's entering your system; your liver is working harder and harder to get rid of the toxins in your system and so on.

Actually, now that I think about it, this has a lot to do with what I spoke about last year with Immune Responses (it's only the last post so you don't have to look too far). The deal with classically conditioned immune responses (specifically in immunosuppressant drugs) is that the cues in the environment are pre-empting the drugs you're about to take so your immune system starts to scale down before the drugs have taken effect.

Now we get to the the link with heroin...

Those same environmental cues, be it the rusty spoon you use to prep your hit (I know, I have no idea what I'm talking about) or the grubby bean bag you always sit in or the person you're usually with, signal to the body that some heroin is on the way. This ramps up the body's drug tolerance in preparation for the wash of heroin that's about to hit the body.

So how can this lead to overdose? If the body is prepared for the drug, it shouldn't make any difference right?

What if those environmental cues aren't there? What if you happen to be somewhere different? Or there's a different person with you? Or you had to replace your bean bag? That's when shit goes down. Your body hasn't ramped up the drug tolerance, there's not as many chemicals to counteract whatever you've just injected into your system and your liver's just chugging along as per normal... which may lead to an overdose.

Now, this is where I thought, "holy shit, that's freaking amazing!" but I do concede you may be thinking, "wtf, that's just speculation. I want some real science". And I agree, so here's some research...

In 1982 some researchers in Ontario Canada were interested in why it was that so many heroin overdoses occurred at levels that seemed to be lower than the drug users usual tolerance level (in some cases it was the same amount (or less) than was tolerated the previous day).

They suspected it may have something to do with a failure of the tolerance to initiate and were aware of other studies that linked environmental cues with increased drug tolerance by way of classical conditioning (sound familiar?).

So they reasoned that if the drug use occurs in an environment that is different from where it usually occurs the drug tolerance may fail to initiated and an overdose occur. Then they tested it on lab rats. They got lab rats basically hooked on heroin, always giving them a dose in the same environment. Then they took some rats and gave the same dose they had been tolerating in a different environment and watched what happened.

I'm going to quote them direct here, because they say it clearer than I could...

"The results of the study...indicate that heroin-induced mortality in heroin-experienced rats is higher when the drug is injected in an environment not previously associated with the drug than when it is injected in the usual drug-administration environment"

There you go. Significantly more rats died of overdoses in new environments that lacked the cues to initial a drug tolerance. It's not necessarily the heroin that kills you, it's deciding to hit up at another person crib (I can't tell you how incredibly uncool I sound in my head saying that).

Kids, don't do drugs.

References

Siegel, 

S.,

 Hinson, 

R. E., Krank 

M. D., & 

McCully, J. (1982). 

Heroin "overdose" death: contribution of drug-associated environmental cues. Science, 216(4544), pp. 436-437. doi: 10.1126/science.7200260

More Classical Conditioning

Following on from my last post I was reading more about Behavioural learning, in particular more about Classical Conditioning. It turns out that this form of conditioning has so many more benefits than making dogs drool on cue...

I mentioned last time about Conditioned Taste Aversion - when a food is paired with nausea which then leads to the food making you feel sick whenever you come across it. I started to think just how amazing that is. In most cases this form of conditioning takes several pairings of the stimulus with the response before it actually takes hold, but Conditioned Taste Aversion is such a strong piece of learning that it only takes one pairing of that curry you had at the dodgy Thai take-away and spending the next three days clutching the toilet to turn you off curry for years. That's a seriously strong conditioned response!

But what really made me think 'Holy crap, I didn't know we could do that!' was the case of Conditioned Immune Responses. It turns out that one of the simplest forms of learning can effect something so vital as your immune system! Studies of patients undergoing chemotherapy for cancer treatment found that simply presenting the same stimuli that is paired with the chemo (ie, the same nurse that you always see, or the room that your always in during the therapy) will achieve the same result in reducing the patients immune responses even before the chemo has been administered.

Holy crap!

Beyond this, another study into drug tolerance found that the environmental cues present when drugs were administered typically became associated with the response of those drugs!

I'm personally going to put my self on the line for science and try this during this flu season. When I get sick this year I'm going to test this theory and play a certain song on my iPod, how about Queen Don't stop me now, when I take my Codrol, then we'll see if I can fight my cold with the power of Queen.

The Story of Pavlov and His Dogs

Okay, I can already see the responses forming in peoples minds - Pavolv? Seriously? Everybody knows about Pavlov... this can't have been enough to blow a mind! And you'd be right. Everybody does know about Pavlov, including me, so in today's lecture I was not expecting to get anything particularly new out of it.

I'm even pretty sure that if you haven't heard of Pavlov's experiments you know about the effect of Classical Conditioning. If you've ever got food poisoning and then couldn't even stand the smell of the food that gave it to you, months or years later then you've been conditioned in the same way that Pavlov's dogs were. Still doesn't sound familiar? Here comes a really brief explanation...

Pavlov was actually a Physiologist who was studying the digestive systems of dogs, to be specific measuring the gastric juices being produced. Pavlov would give present them with food and they would product gastric juices. At the same time that the dogs were given food there was a  noise like a bell that came from the machine that gave them food. One day as Pavlov pressed the button for the food to be given to the dog, the noise like a bell happened but no food appeared... yet the dogs still produced gastric juices.

Thus Pavlov was given the idea of Classical Conditioning in which the pairing of an unconditioned stimulus (the presence of food) with a conditioned stimulus (the bell noise) illicited the unconditioned  response of gastric juices, so that when you took away the unconditioned stimulus (the food) the dogs still illicited the response of getting their stomach juices ready for food.

It's pretty much the bread and butter of Behavioural Psychology, and so far, no mind-blowing action, it was all as I knew it.

The kicker - Pavlov didn't use a bell... ever.

He noticed the pairing between food and his presence not the sound of a bell.

Okay, it's not that mind blowing. I had a better mind-blowing experience from a few weeks back but I wanted start with something light.

Give me your thoughts about Pavlov or maybe even times that you've tried Operant Conditioning in your life.

I'll be back soon with more things that blew my mind.