01/11/2020
https://www.facebook.com/175220432608900/posts/2094475404016717/
"Bruce Alexander, a professor of psychology in Vancouver, explained to me, the idea of addiction we've all got in our heads, that story, comes partly from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple. You get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles: One is just water, and the other is water laced with either he**in or co***ne. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself quite quickly. So there you go, right? That's how we think it works.
In the '70s, Professor Alexander comes along and he looks at this experiment and he noticed something. He said ah, we're putting the rat in an empty cage. It's got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let's try something different. So Professor Alexander built a cage that he called "Rat Park," which is basically heaven for rats. They've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of colored balls, they've got loads of tunnels.
Crucially, they've got loads of friends. They can have loads of s*x. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water. But here's the fascinating thing: In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They almost never use it. None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose.
You go from almost 100 percent overdose when they're isolated to zero percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives." ~Johann Hari
Source: Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong (TED Talk) https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong
See Also:
What Rat Experiments Can Teach Us About Addiction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-0KfwFCMRM
The Opposite of Addiction is Connection https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/love-and-s*x-in-the-digital-age/201509/the-opposite-addiction-is-connection
Rat Park Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajk9uEDEUQc
The Dislocation Theory Of Addiction (Bruce Alexander) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0HjpSGmS00&t=160s
The Power of Addiction and The Addiction of Power: Gabor Maté at TEDxRio+20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66cYcSak6nE
Beating Drug Addiction - The Rat Park Experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpvjH9cVJDI
