Twenty years ago, when I was at FDA, we launched the investigation in tobacco.
I had to learn everything I could about nicotine.
Are All Mental Illnesses Related?
Why does the smoker pick up that cigarette and smoke 780,000 more over a lifetime?
Why does that cigarette become so powerful?
Then I became very interested
in food and in overeating.
So that power to get me to do something that I didn't want to do
but I was going do it anyway.
I began to wonder whether that power of how a stimuli can capture our attention?
How that plays a role, not just, in addiction, cigarettes or drinking or eating.
But what about other stimuli? Ideas, objects, thoughts, feelings.
When you look at someone who's depressed
they can't shake their attention being focused but on negative things and
someone who was manic is focused on those things that are going to make them
feel good.
And at the core of that range of disorders,
what you see is the selective attention that has the ability to affect how we feel.
Capture is how our attention focuses on one stimuli rather than the thousands of
others that are bombarding us.
Capture's neutral. We can be captured by things
that are positive or negative.
But what's key, is not that there's a chemical
imbalance but rather that there are these neural circuits they were all
vulnerable and you can explain a range of disorders, the obsessions, the phobias, the
addictions by looking and seeing what is the object of capture.
Pick any form of treatment. Let's start with drugs.
What drugs do is they dampen
my reactivity and I feel things less. Psychotherapy, in essence,
gets me to look at the world differently.
Hopefully to be captured by something else.
Spirituality gets me to try to distance myself from the stimuli.
They're trying to effect this process of capture.
Capture's part of all of us.
But why does some of us become captured by something.
Someone's captured by else.
What determines that?
What captures us is intensely personal.
Every capture is the result of prior captures.
But what capture does is it tries to pull back the curtain on mental illness,
and says that there is a fundamental mechanism,
to which we're all vulnerable and it's just the way our brains are wired.