Just a few links from a quick search using the terms addiction and the brain, addiction and genetics and addiction, brain, genetics.

gnuzer, I luvs ya', but yer off base on this one. No reasonable person can refute the evidence that genetic vulnerability to addiction is definitely not bullshit.

Few reasonable people will argue that denial of danger is one of the hallmarks of youth. Ask a parent of a child with diabetes or siliac disease.

Few reasonable people will argue that an awful lot of learning comes from experience and mistakes.

That learning process is dependent on both developmental factors and the the complex brain coordinating imput in certain ways. If a particular brain doesn't coordinate in those ways, however, all hell breaks loose. Part of the vulnerability to addiction has to do with numerous genes that influence how the brain functions.


Only way to find out, really, is to take in an addictive substance and see what happens. What is genetic is the degree of vulnerability. Everyone has some vulnerability to addiction. Tie some one down with extremely low vulnerability and force morphine on them long enough and they will develop not only the physical dependence, but also the addiction, i.e. the craving.


Way oversimplified, but basically accurate

Science of addiction info

Genetic vulnerability

addiction genetics

What none of the above links make really apparent is the real function of the part of the brain in which is seated the "pleasure center." This is a very primal part of the brain that, to oversimplify, is responsible for generating the impulses on which basic human survival depends - the seat of many of the impulses and behaviors that we think of as instinctual.

See the rat.