TED Radio Hour – LISTEN with others –
Dec. 13, 2019 – So far on the show, we’ve explored how external factors can impact our ability to be healthy, from where we live to what we do for work and even how our doctors treat us. But what about what’s going on internally?
RACHEL WURZMAN: We believe treatment starts with being aware of what is happening in your own body and the way that your own internal physical experience is related to your emotion.
RAZ: This is Rachel Wurzman.
WURZMAN: So my name is Rachel Wurzman. I have a Ph.D. in neuroscience.
RAZ: Rachel studies and treats addiction. And more specifically, she researches the part of our brain that’s connected to forming habits.
WURZMAN: That part of the brain is called the striatum. And I think I’ve just kind of had a love affair with that part of the brain since the early days of my studying neuroscience. It serves so many more functions than just preparing and chunking together habits, which is what it’s normally known for. But it also, in a sense, serves as this filter for the rest of the brain to sort of recognize patterns of input coming around and the striatum gets activated in a particular way that it releases prepackaged programs of behavior. So you can imagine that it’s really involved in something like addiction, for one thing – compulsive behaviors of a really wide variety.
