The Neuroscience of Addiction Recovery: Creating a Recovery Feedback Loop

This recovery feedback loop in essence allows addicts to live normal, productive lives completely free from addiction. Scientific advances in the fields of neuroscience, applied psychology, and meditation are perhaps the greatest breakthroughs in addiction treatment since the development of 12- step programs. Recovery, we have discovered, is actually a neuroplastic event in which the brain changes how it works. Additionally, just as addiction was once an entrenched behaviour, we can create new neural pathways that establish other, healthier behaviours. Even among the most hopeless of cases where the brain has been irreparably damaged, there can be some improvement with regard to addiction recovery.

With this presentation, we leave behind the stale discussion of the disease model of addiction, and instead jump into a forward-moving, client-centered recovery model. This talk will inform those who wish to know more about current advances in addiction treatment in applied psychology as well as move forward the discourse on neuroscience and its application as part of a whole-health treatment of addiction.