Judson Brewer, author of The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love - Why We Get Hooked, & How We Can Break Bad Habits - kept his meditation practice and medical career separate for a decade. Luckily for us, it eventually dawned on him to inform his research and clinical practice with the 2500-year-old insights of Buddhism.

As he dove deep into the dynamics of addiction, he noticed that the primary western model for understanding human learning - BF Skinner's operant conditioning - was simply another way of describing the Buddhist concept of dependent generation. That is, humans, like all organisms, survived because they learned to associate certain triggers with behaviors that produced a reward that conveyed survival benefit.