How Meditation Helps Overcome Addictions

New York: Rehabilitation therapies that use meditation are likely to have a higher success rate when it comes to helping trying to overcome addiction.

This is the conclusion of a new survey of animal and human studies by a computer scientist who used a computational model of addiction, a literature review and an in silico experiment.

The findings of the survey -- by computer scientist Yariv Levyof the University of Massachusetts Amherst, neuroscience researcher Jerrold Meyer, and computer scientist Andrew Barto -- has been published in the latest issue of the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.

“Our higher-level conclusion is that a treatment based on meditation-like techniques can be helpful as a supplement to help someone get out of addiction. We give scientific and mathematical arguments for this,” said Levy, who was a doctoral student when he undertook the survey.

According to Levy, the survey aimed to use learnings from existing animal and human studies to better understand addiction and seek new approaches to treatment.

The researchers explored the allostatic theory, which describes changes in the brain’s reward and anti-reward systems and reward set points as substance misuse progresses. They used two existing computational models, one pharmacological and a more behavioural-cognitive model for the study.

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