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"rom heroin and cocaine to sex and lies, Tetris and the ponies, the spectrum of human addictions is vast. But for Dr. Nora D. Volkow, the neuroscientist in charge of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, they all boil down to pretty much the same thing. She must say it a dozen times a day: Addiction is all about the dopamine. The pleasure, pain and devilish problem of control are simply the detritus left by waves of this little molecule surging and retreating deep in the brain. A driven worker with a colorful family history and a bad chocolate problem of her own, Dr. Volkow (pronounced VOHL-kuv), 55, has devoted her career to studying this chemical tide. And now, eight years into her tenure at the institute, the pace of addiction research is accelerating, propelled by a nationwide emergency that has sent her agency, with a $1.09 billion budget, into crisis mode. The toll from soaring rates of prescription drug abuse, including both psychiatric medications and drugs for pain, has begun to dwarf that of the usual illegal culprits. Hospitalizations related to prescription drugs are up fivefold in the last decade, and overdose deaths up fourfold. More high school seniors report recreational use of tranquilizers or prescription narcotics, like OxyContin and Vicodin, than heroin and cocaine combined. The numbers have alarmed drug policy experts, their foreboding heightened by the realization that the usual regulatory tools may be relatively unhelpful in this new crisis. As Dr. Volkow said to a group of drug experts convened by the surgeon general last month to discuss the problem, "In the past, when we have addressed the issue of controlled substances, illicit or licit, we have been addressing drugs that we could remove from the earth and no one would suffer." But prescription drugs, she continued, have a double life: They are lifesaving yet every bit as dangerous as banned substances. "The challenges we face are much more complex," Dr. Volkow said, "becau

"Humans are storytelling machines. We don't passively perceive the world - we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the randomness of life. But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We're so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises in pure fiction. Just the other day I learned that one of my cherished childhood tales - the time my older brother put hot peppers in my Chinese food while I was in the bathroom, thus scorching my young tongue - actually happened to my little sister. I'd stolen her trauma. The reason we're such consummate bullshitters is simple: we bullshit for each other. We tweak our stories so that they become better stories. We bend the facts so that the facts appeal to the group. Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures. The power of this phenomenon was demonstrated in a new Science paper by Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond Dolan and Yadin Dudai. The neuroscientists were interested in how the opinion of other people can alter our personal memories, even over a relatively short period of time. The experiment itself was straightforward. A few dozen people watched an eyewitness style documentary about a police arrest in groups of five. Three days later, the subjects returned to the lab and completed a memory test about the documentary. Four days after that, they were brought back once again and asked a variety of questions about the short movie while inside a brain scanner. This time, though, the subjects were given a "lifeline": they were shown the answers given by other people in their film-viewing g

We humans are such complex beasts. Why is it that we can be so wonderful and yet so awful, eccentric and prosaic, enigmatic and obvious, witty and dull, and all of these at once? All in the Mind, presented by Natasha Mitchell, is Radio National's weekly foray into all things mental - a program about the mind, brain and behaviour. From dreaming to depression, addiction to artificial intelligence, consciousness to coma, psychoanalysis to psychopathy, free will to forgetting - All in the Mind explores the human condition through the mind's eye. Our mental machinery remains one of the greatest mysteries of this or any other age, performing for us the most incredible feats of perception, cognition and coordination. Scientists, theologians, philosophers and armchair psychologists alike have long debated its form and function. And yet, the mind, in all its madness and brilliance, continues to elude us. All in the Mind brings together unexpected voices, themes and ideas and engages with both leading thinkers and personal stories. Psychology and human behaviour are only part of the equation. The program's scope is considerably broader and explores themes in science, religion, health, philosophy, education, history and pop culture, with the mind as the key focus.