Lecture 20t - Psychoactive Drugs In Modern Life Flashcards
What’s the positive role of psychopharmacology in relation to mismatch?
Drugs might improve human health, happiness and ultimately reproductive success. So you can use drugs to treat the mismatch, like the diseases that weren’t found in HG society but are found today.
What are 2 main problems with polypharmacy?
Drugs can mimic the effect of adaptive behaviour on the brain, so the brain things it’s good for you and you want more. For example drugs that interact with dopamine and the Mesolimbic system e.g. Cocaine or amphetamines
Drugs also block useful negative adaptive emotions, e.g. Alcohol/BZs reduce fear and increase risk taking
SSRIs reduce emotional strength so you lose motivation. Might lose your good relationship because you can’t care but also stay in an abusive one.
Painkillers reduce pain/malaise which you need to help you recuperate quicker , so they delay your recovery slightly.
What are three benefits of psychopharmacology?
1) If the symptoms are worse than the disease, so a common cold is non fatal, so delaying your recovery and still remaining active because you’ve treated the symptoms is a good balance.
2) if the symptoms are due to mismatch, so they’re not adaptive, panic whilst driving, shyness, pain after surgery (You wouldn’t have had surgery in HG )
3) natural selection is a crude mechanism, so things are only adaptive on average. So some people have appropriate but excessive pain, or anxiety or depression. So using drugs you can fine tune your instincts
Why might it be rational that everybody might benefit from treatment all the time?
It’s posing that normal modern life is diseased because we’re not adapted for the situation. So as we know everyone has colds pretty much constantly, or has hayfever. So maybe drugs are just allowing us to keep an optimal baseline, because our natural one is slightly lower than that.
How can drugs be used to improve or enhance the human condition ?
1) curing Illnesses/ symptoms / mismatch
2) enhance function above normal - smart drugs
Smart drugs like selegiline make you more doc used and have a higher sex drive, but it’s possible they’re just treating an underlying illness
Caffeine wakes you up and matches you to modern busy life
What’s the negative role of psychopharmacology in relation to mismatch?
Drugs can be a cause of mismatch, because they didn’t have them in ancestral conditions so our behaviour can be distorted by drugs, and therefore maladaptive. Nowadays you can become addicted to cocaine and then you die which never would have happened in hunter gatherer
