For about as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been advised by most people in my life not to smoke.
And the more I learned about tobacco, the less surprising this was as both the potentially fatal implications and the long list of other adverse health effects make smoking one of the worst things we can do to our bodies.
But despite warnings, restrictions and outright bans from certain governments, cigarettes remain a lucrative product due to how addictive they are.
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But while that aspect of them is certainly well-known by now, one scientist’s research now suggests that the nicotine that makes them so addictive is manipulating us on more levels than we expected.
And that apparently has a lot to do with why smokers find their cravings are at their strongest after they’ve had a few drinks.
To understand how nicotine influences our brains, we must first understand how the brain typically forms memories.
As Dr. John A. Dani from the Baylor College of Medicine said in reference to a study his team conducted in 2009, our brains often form them by mixing environmental cues with behaviors that contribute to our success in life.
And when we engage in these behaviors, the brain rewards us with dopamine.
However, there are some flaws to this system and Dani’s study identifies a major one.
His team found that nicotine is able to hijack this process by taking enivronmental cues that we come to associate with smoking and building fond memories around them.
So if an ex-smoker tended to light up while drinking, eating with friends, or even while driving home, it’s suddenly hard to separate these other behaviors from smoking. This makes it fairly easy to introduce strong cravings.
Dani’s team was able to track this by measuring the brain activity of mice that traveled into a compartment where they received a nicotine injection and comparing it to mice who just received saline.
In Dani’s words, “The brain activity change was just amazing. Compared to injections of saline, nicotine strengthened neuronal connections – sometimes up to 200 percent. This strengthening of connections underlies new memory formation.”
This only worked when the brain’s reward centers activated, but Dani found in another study that the association between drinking and tobacco cravings also worked in reverse.
In a 2013 study published in Neuron , his team found that the rats they worked with ingested more alcohol after a nicotine treatment than they otherwise would have.
This was because nicotine can also influence the brain’s stress hormone pathways, which leads an affected person to seek a dopamine release through (in this case) alcohol.
But even those who approach smoking and drinking with purely hedonistic intentions will still find tobacco to be a false friend.
That’s because Dani’s 2013 study found that in addition to encouraging a person to drink more, the way that nicotine manipulates stress hormone pathways also reduces how much dopamine they’ll be able to get from that drinking.
So not only does nicotine trick our brains into forming positive memories around it, but it also plays with our stress hormones enough that we don’t enjoy it as much when we try to recreate those memories.
h/t: Eurekalert , Neuron
