Business Insider has a great post about human behavior that we all should read, 47 Mind-Blowing Psychology-Proven Facts You Should Know About Yourself. I’m not sure about the strength of that “facts” claim, but it seems like most of the research cited has been time-tested and repeated often. #8 is a fantastic explanation of how and why we are addicted to Twitter, Facebook, text messaging, email and Google search (from WhatMakesThemClick.net, author of the original 100 list, @thebrainlady on Twitter). [I’ve posted about the power of the intermittent reward system before; it is the dark side of The Force and it shan’t be ignored.]
Take a look through this run-down and try to shut down the laptop, put down the phone sometimes.
#8 — Dopamine Makes You Addicted To Seeking Information
Image: xorsyst
Do you ever feel like you are addicted to email or twitter or texting? Do you find it impossible to ignore your email if you see that there are messages in your inbox? Have you ever gone to Google to look up some information and 30 minutes later you realize that you’ve been reading and linking, and searching around for a long time, and you are now searching for something totally different than before? These are all examples of your dopamine system at work.
Enter dopamine – Neuro scientists have been studying what they call the dopamine system for a while. Dopamine was “discovered” in 1958 by Arvid Carlsson and Nils-Ake Hillarp at the National Heart Institute of Sweden. Dopamine is created in various parts of the brain and is critical in all sorts of brain functions, including thinking, moving, sleeping, mood, attention, and motivation, seeking and reward.
The myth — You may have heard that dopamine controls the “pleasure” systems of the brain: that dopamine makes you feel enjoyment, pleasure, and therefore motivates you to seek out certain behaviors, such as food, sex, and drugs.
It’s all about seeking — The latest research, though is changing this view. Instead of dopamine causing us to experience pleasure, the latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases our general level of arousal and our goal-directed behavior. (From an evolutionary stand-point this is critical. The dopamine seeking system keeps us motivated to move through our world, learn, and survive). It’s not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes us curious about ideas and fuels our searching for information. The latest research shows that it is the opoid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure.
Wanting vs. liking – According to Kent Berridge, these two systems, the “wanting” (dopamine) and the “liking” (opoid) are complementary. The wanting system propels us to action and the liking system makes us feel satisfied and therefore pause our seeking. If our seeking isn’t turned off at least for a little while, then we start to run in an endless loop. The latest research shows that the dopamine system is stronger than the opoid system. We seek more than we are satisfied (back to evolution… seeking is more likely to keep us alive than sitting around in a satisfied stupor).
A dopamine induced loop – With the internet, twitter, and texting we now have almost instant gratification of our desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type it into google. What to see what your friends are up to? Go to twitter or facebook. We get into a dopamine induced loop… dopamine starts us seeking, then we get rewarded for the seeking which makes us seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, stop checking our cell phones to see if we have a message or a new text.
Anticipation is better than getting — Brain scan research shows that our brains show more stimulation and activity when we ANTICIPATE a reward than when we get one. Research on rats shows that if you destroy dopamine neurons, rats can walk, chew, and swallow, but will starve to death even when food is right next to them. They have lost the desire to go get the food.
More, more, more – Although wanting and liking are related, research also shows that the dopamine system doesn’t have satiety built in. It is possible for the dopamine system to keep saying “more more more”, seeking even when we have found the information. During that google exploration we know that we have the answer to the question we originally asked, and yet we find ourselves looking for more information and more and more.
Unpredictable is the key — Dopamine is also stimulated by unpredictability. When something happens that is not exactly predictable, that stimulates the dopamine system. Think about these electronic gadgets and devices. Our emails and twitters and texts show up, but we don’t know exactly when they will or who they will be from. It’s unpredictable. This is exactly what stimulates the dopamine system. It’s the same system at work for gambling and slot machines. (For those of you reading this who are “old school” psychologists, you may remember “variable reinforcement schedules”. Dopamine is involved in variable reinforcement schedules. This is why these are so powerful).
When you hear the “ding” that you have a text – The dopamine system is especially sensitive to “cues” that a reward is coming. If there is a small, specific cue that signifies that something is going to happen, that sets off our dopamine system. So when there is a sound when a text message or email arrives, or a visual cue, that enhances the addictive effect (for the psychologists out there: remember Pavlov).
140 characters is even more addictive – And the dopamine system is most powerfully stimulated when the information coming in is small so that it doesn’t full satisfy. A short text or twitter (can only be 140 characters!) is ideally suited to send our dopamine system raging.
Not without costs — This constant stimulation of the dopamine system can be exhausting. We are getting caught in an endless dopamine loop.
Write a comment and share whether you get caught in these dopamine loops and whether you think we should use what we know about these systems to create devices and websites that stimulate them.
And for those of you who like research:
Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, What is the role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience?: Brain Research Reviews 28 1998. 309–369.
Originally published on WhatMakesThemClick.net.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/100-things-you-should-know-about-people-2010-11?op=1#ixzz1ceHpSNzo
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Christine,
I’m wired strangely — not a surprise to you, I’m sure! 🙂 I like all that stuff — I guess I get my dopamine charge — but I have no trouble prioritizing. If I have something more important to do, I do it. Dropping Facebook for three weeks? Done that. Ignoring e-mails that can wait? Check. Letting my RSS feeds back up until I have 5,000 stories to read? Um, guilty — I’m here b/c I decided to look at my four or five key feeds, including PurpleCar. The rest can wait, even though I find all of the feeds I subscribe to interesting. And, I have diff ringtones and text alerts for family and non-family. If I’m busy, my phone stays on my hip for non-family alerts.
I guess I’m a dopamine user, but not an addict? 🙂
Thanks for the research — I’m going to burn some dopamine on that when I get a chance! [In other words, reading your sources will likely cause me to need to read some more-more-more on the subject!]
Yeah I am not so sure this applies to tech folks. We’ve had enough “search dopamine” (I should send you the poem I wrote about this) to get desensitized to it. The other side for us is the guilt we might feel for ignoring our social networks for weeks at a time. I feel guilty when I drop Twitter… not so much about Facebook, though, to be honest. Although, I am getting, from “normal” people: “You didn’t see my Facebook post?!”
The key is to stop searching when you’ve learned enough… but the challenge of our society is to recognize when enough is enough. This is our problem. The abundance of information-inducing opoid and dopamine of the Internet makes “enough is enough” a truly valuable skill.
-C