I feel like this is a dumb question, but I’m really struggling with my phone addiction and I want to know why this happens. I’m also generally curious about the brain and how it works, especially in addiction cases. Is our brain evolution just not caught up with the new technology?
I’m already aware that our brains release dopamine when we use our phones, but why?
Yesterday I read that our brains release dopamine when we fulfill a survival need- the article used eating and sex as examples. Obviously we’ll die without eating, and our species will die without sex (reproduction), so it makes sense for our brains to reward us for these things.
But scrolling on a smartphone isn’t a survival need. It’s fun, but we won’t die without it. So why does my brain release dopamine when I use my phone, so much that I’ve become addicted to it (specifically scrolling)?
In: Biology
I have a PhD in neuroscience and study reward and addiction, including the role of neurons in the mesolimbic dopamine pathway in drug and social reward.
The stuff you have read about dopamine is mostly horseshit. Dopamine is not a reward/pleasure signal, and it is not primarily released at moments of satisfaction. Setting aside the fact that there are many dopaminergic pathways that have nothing to do with reward, AND the fact that the specific dopamine pathway people are *thinking of* when they say dopamine=reward involves many other types of neurons besides dopamine releasing neurons, even that specific subset of dopamine neurons is not specifically associated with reward. It’s more like “focused attention on something, good OR bad.”
The main reason all these pop-sci explanations for what dopamine does etc. are so commonly repeated and believed is that they are more palatable than the truth, which is that brains are terrifyingly complex and we don’t understand reward / motivation very well at all. Explanations like “dopamine = reward/satisfaction” are satisfyingly easy to understand, which makes people intuitively prefer those explanations.
If you have noticed that the stuff you have been reading about dopamine is kind of confusing and has large gaps that leave you thinking “wait, but how does THAT part happen?”, this is why. It’s not a defect in your ability to understand the explanations, it’s that the explanations are bogus.
Compare to another complex topic: how computers work. It’s a complex topic with many layers to it, but if you Google / ask reddit about any particular layer (how do transistors work, logic gates, how logic gates can add numbers, binary numbers, etc.) you can get a detailed explanation. And, the explanations you get from different sources will largely agree with each other on the specific details. In contrast when you Google stuff about dopamine, you’ll get a lot of conflicting information that doesn’t really fit together, and if you then try to get more information about other layers of the problem (e.g. but how does the brain KNOW when to release dopamine / how does dopamine supposedly produce good feelings?) you’ll either get no answer or very vague and low-detail answers.
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