Addiction
This section is about the power of dopamine on our children, the brain and its the reward pathways, the human need for novelty, and how the real cost of a thing is the time we give up for it.
“The smartphone has become the modern-day hypodermic needle”
READ: DR ANNA LEMBKE - THE JOURNAL (2021)
This article summarises why smart phones are so addictive. Here is an excerpt:
“Our brains release dopamine when we make human connections, which incentivises us to do it again… But today, social connection has become druggified by social media apps, making us all vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. Instead of releasing a little bit of dopamine in our brain’s reward pathway, social media apps have the potential to release much larger quantities all at once, just like heroin or meth or alcohol.
Social media apps become drugs by augmenting the features of human connection that make any substance or behaviour addictive: access, quantity, potency, and novelty… The quantity is endless. Instagram never runs out.”
“God only knows what this is doing to our children’s brains”
He goes on to say how the thinking behind these applications was all about:
“How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible. And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while — because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content… It’s a social-validation feedback loop… You’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors / creators understood this consciously, and we did it anyway.”
Electronic Cocaine
Dr Kardaras is an expert on young people and digital addiction. He believes that screen addiction should be clinically recognized in the same way as substance addiction. According to him,
“Brain imaging research shows that stimulating glowing screens are as dopaminergic – dopamine-activating – to the brain’s pleasure centre as sex.
Current clinical research correlates screen tech with disorders like ADHD, addiction, anxiety, depression, increased aggression, and even psychosis. Most shocking of all, recent brain imaging studies conclusively show that excessive screen exposure can neurologically damage a young person’s developing brain in the same way that drug addiction can.”
He cites Dr. Peter Whybrow, Director of Neuroscience at UCLA, who calls computers “Electronic Cocaine” for the brain.
There are even cases of children violently attacking, and in some cases killing, one or both parents who had removed their devices. Yes, the cases are grim, extreme and unlikely to happen, but the phenomenon is worth knowing about if you were in any doubt about their addictiveness.
Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp’s “seeking” system
As described in this Huff Post article, 2017
“Dopamine-energized, this mesolimbic SEEKING system, arising from the ventral tegmental area (VTA), encourages foraging, exploration, investigation, curiosity, interest and expectancy. Dopamine fires each time the rat (or human) explores its environment.”
And later:
“…this SEEKING System is implicated in everything from our constant meaning-making (searching the environment for significant connections) to, in its excessive form, addictions. ‘Check out a cocaine addict cruising for a new fix,’ Panksepp observed. Or someone addicted to the internet, going from one Google search to another. Dopamine is firing, keeping the human being in a constant state of alert expectation.”
It seems safe to surmise that if these impulses are fulfilled by time on a device, our children’s time and appetite for real world explorations are being diminished.
In The Cyber Effect, Aiken references Dr Martin Seligman, a cognitive behaviour psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “These technological gadgets are more responsive than anything we have ever seen on this planet. The problem is that the outcomes over which they give us such exquisite control may be trivial… They promise more than they deliver. Rather than allowing us to get to the substance of life in a more efficient way, they have become the substance itself, crowding other matters – murkier and less responsive to be sure – out of the scene.”
Later she comments, “People engage in behaviours that give them a feeling of control, but paradoxically they cannot control those behaviours. This is classic addiction.”
Must Read
Further reading
Read this piece in The I, titled, Smartphone use is an addiction for 1 in 4 youngsters.
Can we ever kick our smartphone addiction? Jim Balsillie and Norman Doidge discuss.
Thoreau’s words are very relevant here – that the ‘cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.’ Quoted in this 2019 New Yorker article - What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away, which is worth reading in full.
The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media by Richard Seymour, which includes the following:
“Turns out that the same techniques that can persuade people to eat healthier food, get more exercise and live more sustainably can also be used to hook people in to buy products or turn over their data.”
Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change
By Winifred Gallagher
“Follow a crawling baby around and you’ll see that right from the beginning, nothing excites us more than something new and different. Our unique human brains are biologically primed to engage with and even generate novelty.”