ArticleBrain and cognition2020
Embodying addiction: A predictive processing account.
Article in Brain and cognition, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 81 citations in OpenAlex.
- The relationship between regular substance use and cost comparisons in stable and volatile learning contexts.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Learning to attenuate myself: a predictive processing account of body-scan meditation and the dissolution of bodily boundaries.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- The informational dysregulation framework of addiction (IDFA): an information-processing model of relapse in opioid use disorder.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Shifting boundaries, extended minds: ambient technology and extended allostatic control.Synthese · 2025Article
- A new predictive coding model for a more comprehensive account of delusions.The lancet. Psychiatry · 2024Review
- Increased ventral anterior insular connectivity to sports betting availability indexes problem gambling.Addiction biology · 2024Article
- Surfing uncertainty with screams: predictive processing, error dynamics and horror films.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Physical Exercise to Redynamize Interoception in Substance use Disorders.Current neuropharmacology · 2024Article
- Digital Being: social media and the predictive mind.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Article
- Psilocybin for Opioid Use Disorder in Two Adults Stabilized on Buprenorphine: A Technical Report on Study Modifications and Preliminary Findings.Psychedelic medicine (New Rochelle, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Computational models of behavioral addictions: State of the art and future directions.Addictive behaviors · 2023Review
- Lifeworlds in pain: a principled method for investigation and intervention.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Review
- Special Issue: Experiencing Well-BeingPlayfulness and the meaningful life: an active inference perspective.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Article
- Modeling and controlling the body in maladaptive ways: an active inference perspective on non-suicidal self-injury behaviors.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Article
- Bedside to bench: the outlook for psychedelic research.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2023Review
- Do Gamers Play for Money? A Moderated Mediation of Gaming Motives, Relative Deprivation, and Upward Mobility.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- AI ethics in computational psychiatry: From the neuroscience of consciousness to the ethics of consciousness.Behavioural brain research · 2022Article
- Computational analysis of probabilistic reversal learning deficits in male subjects with alcohol use disorder.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- How Psychedelic-Assisted Treatment Works in the Bayesian Brain.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Heart rate variability and interoceptive accuracy predict impaired decision-making in Gambling Disorder.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In this paper we show how addiction can be thought of as the outcome of learning. We look to the increasingly influential predictive processing theory for an account of how learning can go wrong in addiction. Perhaps counter intuitively, it is a consequence of this predictive processing perspective on addiction that while the brain plays a deep and important role in leading a person into addiction, it cannot be the whole story. We'll argue that predictive processing implies a view of addiction not as a brain disease, but rather as a breakdown in the dynamics of the wider agent-environment system. The environment becomes meaningfully organised around the agent's drug-seeking and using behaviours. Our account of addiction offers a new perspective on what is harmful about addiction. Philosophers often characterise addiction as a mental illness because addicts irrationally shift in their judgement of how they should act based on cues that predict drug use. We argue that predictive processing leads to a different view of what can go wrong in addiction. We suggest that addiction can prove harmful to the person because as their addiction progressively takes hold, the addict comes to embody a predictive model of the environment that fails to adequately attune them to a volatile, dynamic environment. The use of an addictive substance produces illusory feedback of being well-attuned to the environment when the reality is the opposite. This can be comforting for a person inhabiting a hostile niche, but it can also prove to be harmful to the person as they become skilled at living the life of an addict, to the neglect of all other alternatives. The harm in addiction we'll argue is not to be found in the brains of addicts, but in their way of life.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.