(silence) One of the most remarkable real-life examples I've ever witnessed of the power of belief in God, I'm just gonna say it as it occurred, I have a good friend who for many years struggled with alcohol and drug addiction of multiple kinds. Incredibly kind person, incredibly successful in his career, married, two beautiful children, multiple relapses, crashed his truck at seven in the morning after getting intoxicated at 6.30 in the morning, got out of that one, happened again and again, multiple rehab centers of the sort of standard treatment, et cetera, and then ultimately enough happened within that whole set of circumstances that his wife said, you know, this is it.

You've got to solve this or we just can't be with you. A very scary situation for everybody involved, including him, who absolutely adored his family. He told us, his friends, that he was going to go to a center here in Los Angeles that treats addiction with essentially religion, a belief in God.

He was already fairly religious. Most Sundays he attended church and things of that sort. And you can imagine we all thought, including myself, like, okay, dude, like, good luck. I hope this works. But like, I would say zero minus one confidence in his ability to get and stay sober.

He just had not succeeded prior to this. He's been sober more than four years now. He got out of there and never looked back. And I wonder now whether something, something must've changed in his brain by adopting what was essentially a- - Different incentive structure. - Right, different incentive structure, but fear wasn't doing it before, fear of extreme consequences, which were on the table at that time, when he went in, weren't enough.

Something about going there and the work that he did there allowed him to then, it's almost like he got another prefrontal cortex, a more powerful prefrontal cortex. So maybe we could talk about that. - Well, that's not a bad way of thinking about what it is that people are trying to do when they, say, pray.

So you can invite in spirits to possess you. That's a good way of thinking about it. I know that's odd terminology, but that's what you do when you dwell on your rage. Right, right. Now imagine that you're doing that in the most positive possible direction. So what you're doing is you're generating a hypothesis about the mode of conduct and perception that would best typify you if you were ideal, and then establishing a relationship with that and inviting it in.

That's what the evangelical Protestants are doing when they formulate a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That's exactly what they're doing. Now on the addiction side, so I studied alcoholism for years. That was the target of my dissertation in the first 20 papers that I published. I knew the alcoholism literature very well, and the neurological end of it as well.

And it was known, among alcohol researchers, it's been known for 60 years, more even, that the most reliable treatment for alcoholism was religious transformation. And this is well accepted among researchers in the field who have no religious affiliation whatsoever. And I do believe that a huge part of that is a consequence of incentive restructuring.

So you said, for example, with your friend, that fear wouldn't work. Well, alcohol's a pretty good anxiolytic drug, but it's also, for people who are prone to alcoholism, it's a good incentive reward source, like cocaine. If you're going to, you can't get rats addicted to cocaine if they live in a natural environment.

They have to be isolated in a cage before they'll bar press to their own death for cocaine. So one of the things you wanna do when you treat addiction is you wanna substitute a new incentive structure, right? Because part of the addictive process is you fall into a false incentive pattern, right?

'Cause cocaine makes you feel like you're doing something useful in respect to an important goal, even though you're not. It mimics that. - Even if you know you're not. - Even if you know it's irrelevant. - And I'll just say, I've never done cocaine. I would be open about it if I had.

I think I like dopaminergic states enough that I've been very scared of doing it, frankly. Also, it wasn't around much just because of when I went to college. It just wasn't a drug that was around much. But it's a remarkable drug in the sense that people who take cocaine seem to be excited about everything.

They're in this high dopaminergic state. And their brain becomes exceptionally good at finding cocaine, even in the absence of resources, which is pretty remarkable if you think about it. I mean, most people can't find the thing or get the thing they want in the absence of the resources to get it.

But people who take hard drugs that really spike dopamine somehow manage. Yeah, sure, sometimes they lie, sometimes lie, cheat, and steal. Lie, cheat, and steal, but they'll do other things too, right? They'll socialize with people that have it so they don't have to lie, cheat, and steal. It's incredible to see that drug and things like methamphetamine take over people's minds.

And now I'm thinking- The pathway appears when the aim is firmly in mind, right? See, this is another insistence that's derived from the religious literature. So, because the idea there is that if your aim is upward, the pathway forward to that will make itself manifest. And that's true. You just pointed out that it was true in relationship to addiction, right?

Is that if once you're in that realm of possessed personality, the pathway forward will show itself to you even under straitened circumstances, right? And it's partly because you can think of our perceptual systems and our emotional systems, for that matter, as navigating tools, right? So now the addiction, the addicted brain, what they say, the aim is possessed by the substance of addiction, right?

So now the highest god is cocaine. Let's say. And so now all pathways in the world are pathways to cocaine. All objects in the world are markers on the pathway to cocaine. 'Cause it just dominates, but it's not just an impulse. It dominates the perceptual landscape as well. That's makes it, and the emotional landscape.

And it comes with all these rationalizations. That's all those lies, right? The whole thing, it's a whole personality. Yeah, brutal, brutal. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)