Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

StudyAlert
Remember that although 
there are alternate tech-
niques used in meditation, 
they are all designed to 
bring about an altered state 
of consciousness in which attention 
is refocused.
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John Brodhead’s bio reads like a script for an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music.
A young rebel from the New Jersey suburbs falls in with a fast crowd, gets hooked on 
parties and booze and, with intensive counseling and a bit of tough love, manages to 
get his life back together. What makes his story different? Just one thing: his age. John 
is 13. (Rogers, 2002)
John Brodhead was lucky. Now in recovery, John had begun to drink when he was 
in the sixth grade. He is not alone: The number of kids who start drinking by the 
eighth grade has increased by almost a third since the 1970s, even though alcohol 
consumption overall has stayed fairly steady among the general population. 
Drugs of one sort or another are a part of almost everyone’s life. From infancy 
on, most people take vitamins, aspirin, cold-relief medicine, and the like, and surveys 
fi nd that 80% of adults in the United States have taken an over-the-counter pain 
reliever in the last six months. However, these drugs rarely produce an altered state 
of consciousness (Dortch, 1996). 
In contrast, some substances, known as psychoactive drugs, lead to an altered 
state of consciousness.  Psychoactive drugs  infl uence a person’s emotions, percep-
tions, and behavior. Yet even this category of drugs is common in most of our lives. 
If you have ever had a cup of coffee or sipped a beer, you have taken a psychoactive 
drug. A large number of individuals have used more potent—and more dangerous— 
psychoactive drugs than coffee and beer (see Figure 1 on page 160); for instance, 
surveys fi nd that 41% of high school seniors have used an illegal drug in the last 
year. In addition, 30% report having been drunk on alcohol. The fi gures for the adult 
population are even higher (Johnston et al., 2009).
 
Of course, drugs vary widely in the effects they have on users, in part because 
they affect the nervous system in very different ways. Some drugs alter the limbic 
system, and others affect the operation of specifi c neurotransmitters across the syn-
apses of neurons. For example, some drugs block or enhance the release of neu-
rotransmitters, others block the receipt or the removal of a neurotransmitter, and still 
others mimic the effects of a particular neurotransmitter (see Figure 2 on page 160).