Irresistible - Adam Alter Flashcards
Never get high on your own supply
“We limit how much technology our kids use in the home” - Steve Jobs
These entrepreneurs recognise that the tools they promote will ensnare users indiscriminately. There isn’t a bright line between addicts and the rest of us.
Social media platforms are engines for addiction. The problem isn’t that people lack willpower say design ethicists. It’s that there are 1,000 people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.
Human behaviour is drive in part by a succession of reflective cost-benefit calculations. When benefits overwhelm costs, it’s hard not to perform the act over and over again.
Behavioural addiction consists of 6 components:
1/ Compelling goals that are just beyond reach
2/ Unpredictable feedback
3/ A sense of incremental progress and feedback
4/ Tasks that become slowly more difficult over time
5/ Unresolved tensions that demand resolution
6/ Strong social connections
Fear of being w/o mobile phone contact = “nomophobia”
Phones are disruptive by their mere existence even when they are not in use.
Exercise addiction has become a psychiatric speciality due to technology. People who wear exercise watches become trapped in a cycle of escalation.
Life is more convenient than ever (shopping/porn), but convenience has also weaponised temptation.
Addiction is a deep attachment to an experience that is harmful and difficult to do without.
Why can’t the term ‘addiction’ apply to a majority of the population? We must not devalue the term.
Smartphones and email are hard to resist because they’re both part of the fabric of society.
In 2000, Microsoft Canada reported that the average human had an attention span of twelve seconds; by 2013 that number had fallen to eight seconds.
Many people remember Freud for his theories of human personality, sexuality and dreaming, but he was also famous in his day for promoting cocaine. He found that cocaine not only gave him energy, but also calmed his recurring bouts of depression and indigestion.
Freud was seduced by cocaine in part because he lived during a time when addiction was presumed to affect people who were weak of mind and body.
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The addict in all of us
Few US soldiers in Vietnam had been within a mile of heroin before joining the army. 54 per cent had become addicted by the end.
On their return home, 95 per cent of recovering GIs managed to stay clean. For decades, experts had assumed that drug addicts were predisposed to the condition, somehow wired incorrectly. Research turned this assumption on its head.
Electrical stimulation in a certain part of the brain can be pleasurable. If you insert an electrode into a depressed woman’s pleasure centre, she will begin to giggle. She will not want the probe to be removed. Euphoria can be addictive.
Rat 34 had a probe placed in the pleasure centre mistakenly (rather than mid-brain area). This is why he continued to press the metal bar and receive electric shocks. He wasn’t an addict by nature. Like the Vietnam G.I.s he was a victim of circumstance.
You can therefore think of addiction as a form of learning and as part of memory. Addiction embeds itself in memory.
The reason why most of the Vietnam vets escaped their heroin addiction was because they had escaped the circumstance that ensnared them.
Time has made a fool of the experts who once believed that addiction was reserved for a wretched minority.
Just as drugs have become more powerful over time, so has the thrill of behavioural feedback. Product designers are smarter than ever.
Our brains host a flurry of electrical activity when we’re engaged with an addictive behaviour: mimic the right brain patterns and you create the addict.
Biology of Behavioural Addiction
Chronic sleep deprivation is behavioural addiction’s partner - the consequence of persistent over-engagement.
The Sleep Revolution: “Do not charge your mobile phones by your bed”
Brain interprets red light as a signal for bedtime. Blue light (from electronic devices) is a different story, because it signals morning.
Drugs and addictive behaviours activate the same reward centre in the brain. Drugs like cocaine and heroin are more dangerous in the short-term as they stimulate the reward centres with more intensity than behaviours.
In both cases, a chemical called dopamine is released by the brain which attaches itself to receptors and produces an intense flush of pleasure.
Substances and addictive experiences send dopamine production into overdrive.
The substance or behaviour itself isn’t addictive until we learn to use it as a salve for our psychological troubles.
Infatuated lovers placed in a brain scanner show high levels of activity in the VTA (ventral tegmental area) - the tiny factory near the base of the brain that makes dopamine and sends this chemical to many other brain regions.
Dopamine and Endorphin are both neurotransmitters. The key difference between Dopamine and Endorphin is that Dopamine is a small molecule neurotransmitter which is mainly responsible for movements and feeling of pleasure while the Endorphin is a larger molecule of neuropeptide with the main function of pain relief.
Parkinson’s disease results from a dopamine deficit so we treat the disease with drugs that replace dopamine.
Many patients develop addictions to dopamine replacement drugs. The drugs are so strong that patients develop side-effects - behavioural addictions: substance and behavioural addictions are essentially 2 versions of the same malfunctioning program.
There is a big difference between liking a drug and wanting a drug. Addiction is about more than just liking.
When people make decisions, they privilege wanting over liking. Liking is anatomically tiny and fragile. Occupies a very small part of the brain.
In contrast it’s not easy to disrupt the activation of an intense want.
Relapse is common because even after you come to hate a drug for ruining your life, your brain continues to want it. The same is true of behaviours.
Addiction is like misguided love: falling in love with the wrong person is a classic case of wanting without liking.
Addictions aren’t driven by substances or behaviours, but by the idea, learned across time, that they protect addicts from psychological distress.
