why video games provide dopamine when they offer no benefit to your survival
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Your brain technically doesn’t know what a video game is lol. Games are made to simulate high-stakes experiences and your brain reacts naturally.
The rewards center of the brain is an ancient product of evolution. Nobody programmed it to know what is good for your survival and what it not. Rather natural selection gave it a rough set of heuristics to use to reward or punish your psyche based on what you do. It rewards you for doing things that look, to it, vaguely like doing things that have historically promoted survival and reproduction. Collecting stuff, vanquishing foes, and strengthening social ties are really good for you. These and other things you might simulate in a video game are close enough to trick some part of your brain into believing you are achieving something good for you.
See my actual answer in bold, some background is needed though.
Lots of YouTube videos (dopamine fast etc.) and news articles etc. hypersimplify how dopamine works in the brain more or less like: “You do something pleasurable, and boom, dopamine is released!” While this is true, the actual picture is much more complicated and that. Dopamine, as an important central nervous system (CNS) neurotransmitter, is released *all the time* during normal function of the brain, to allow dopaminergic pathways to continue to communicate and perform important cognitive functions, ***only one of which*** is the understanding and processing of pleasurable feedback. Dopamine activity is indeed correlated with rewarding activity, but important factors like the amount and duration and pattern of dopamine neuron firing are very important. Other neurotransmitters, like serotonin, which is strongly associated with learning about aversive events (think the opposite of dopamine) work together with dopamine to teach you how pleasant/unpleasant an event or sensation is, and whether to pursue it in future or avoid it. ***Videogames, if enjoyable and fun will under the correct circumstances (massive fun victory, awesome loot drop) cause dopamine and other neurotransmitter release to effect cognitive processing because the information and sensations you feel, while stimulated by a game, are extremely real to your brain, since your brain only sees it as information to process, just like information that would be fed to the brain by “real life”.***
It’s all too technical to explain here on reddit, but it is a huge oversimplification to say that videogames (or anything ejoyable) causes the brain to release only dopamine (and a lot of sources cite this as being inherently bad, it isn’t bad by definition, but excessive reward seeking behavior can cause undesired changes in the brain’s reward center)
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