TITLE:
A Brief Review of the Relationship between Addiction and Memory Systems
AUTHORS:
Kevin Patrick Barman
KEYWORDS:
Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Learning and Memory, Memory Systems
JOURNAL NAME:
World Journal of Neuroscience,
Vol.13 No.3,
August
21,
2023
ABSTRACT: This essay will reexamine research on the relationship
between human memory and addiction. This paper will review several studies that
discussed how memory systems in the human brain are involved in the acquisition
of behavior that is learned and is associated with the development of drug
addiction and drug relapse. Additional information reveals that when
individuals make the transition from recreational drug or impulsive use to
compulsive drug abuse, which may result in a neuroanatomical change in areas of
the brain from cognitive control guided by the hippocampus/dorsomedial striatum
towards conditioned control of behavior managed by the dorsolateral striatum
(DLS) [1]. This review also looked at studies that involved experiments with
humans and lower animals, which suggested that the hippocampus mediates a
cognitive/spatial type of memory, while the dorsal striatum manages stimulus-response
(S-R) habit memory, and the amygdala governs the classical conditioning form of
learning and stimulus-affective-associative relationships [1]. Overall, these
studies utilize the hypothesis of the memory systems view of addiction, and the
involvement of learning and memory in the context of drug addiction, which was
proposed by them [2]. This theory has been proposed in response to drug
addiction research and includes alcohol, amphetamine, and cocaine [1]. The
research also explains how stress and anxiety can play a role in how strong
emotional excitement can lead to dependent habit memory in rodents and humans [1].