It is known that many brain regions such as the ventral tegmental area, known as the reward center of the brain, the frontal cortex responsible for many functions of the brain such as reasoning, decision making, impulse control, the amygdala responsible for the management of emotions, the Nucleus Accumbens and Striatum associated with learning are responsible for the development of addiction. At each stage of addiction, changes occur in different parts of the brain, so the development of addiction is a very complex process.
Normally, stimuli that give us pleasure, such as art and eating, cause an increase in dopamine in the reward center of the brain. Substance use also causes a high amount of dopamine to be released from the reward center. This dopamine causes the person to feel pleasure.
Under normal circumstances, an individual has many goals and needs to choose some of them. The emergence of goals, their valuation and the choice of action is associated with the frontal cortex. One of the important aspects of addiction is that the choice of these goals is often limited to those related to the substance. The dopamine release triggered by substance intake affects the frontal cortex over time, causing wrong decisions to be made and the actions chosen to be limited to substance use. At the same time, dopamine also affects learning-related areas of the brain such as the Nucleus Accumbens and Striatum, causing impaired learning ability. People who develop substance addiction are also impaired in their ability to learn, store and remember new information. Repetitive and excessive dopamine release also interferes with the enjoyment of eating, art and music, which are known as natural rewards and normally bring pleasure.