I'm having a small reading binge about addiction. I have no such problem (thank Heavens!, it really sucks to be addicted to anything) but it's a fascinating subject.
It started with this book, where I realized, for the first time, that not everyone can have *just one glass* of wine at dinner. This fascinated me:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35959632-the-recovering?from_search=true
The Recovering is an intelligent, thorough book about addiction that includes cultural history, literary criticism, journalistic reportage, and memoir.
Then I wanted to know how addiction works neurologically. So I bought this audiobook:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23214265-the-biology-of-desire
The strength of this book lies in how well it ties various strands together - it is part introduction to neuroscience, part polemic and part compelling storytelling.
Then I found an even better lecture series that also covers biology, genetics and chemistry. And it also covers gambling, porn and junk-food as "supernormal stimuli":
https://www.audible.de/pd/The-Addic...4E8YJ3314F74D5NK&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1
Also, it seems that falling in love uses the same brain mechanisms and processes as getting addicted
A few years before I had read this book, also very good:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-design?from_search=true
The book is thorough yet covers a lot of topics, including the environmental design of casinos, the design and ergonomics of machines, how electronic slot machines are mapped so it looks like the odds are better, why people gamble, the way games adapt to players, the massive amount of data collected by player reward cards, the actions of gaming industry lobby groups and impact on government policies, and theories and issues related to recovery from gambling addiction.
But it's only now that I get a feeling for the mechanisms behind addiction. And now don't start telling me that binge reading books on addiction is also an addiction