Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

~ Live & Learn

We’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting … the increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon to a website near you. Scientists rely on dopamine as a kind of universal currency for measuring the addictive potential of any experience. The more dopamine in the brain’s reward pathway, the more addictive the experience. In addition to the discovery of dopamine, one of the most remarkable neuroscientific findings in the past century is that the brain processes pleasure and pain in the same place. Further, pleasure and pain work like opposite sides of a balance. We’ve all experienced that moment of craving a second piece of chocolate, or wanting a good book, movie, or video game to last forever. That moment of wanting is the brain’s pleasure balance tipped to the side of pain.

— Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Dutton, August 24, 2021)

25 thoughts on “Monday Morning Wake-Up Call”

  3. Drugs and stimulation were always used in every society. It’s neither better nor worse in our current societies than it was before. The means of stimulation change and the morals behind our judging as well. Stimulating the dopamin distribution is basic for the development of a society.
    Have a happy week
    The Fab Four of Cley
    🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

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  6. Kill your data! Or maybe we need to do some better human-time balancing — i.e., for whatever amount of time we just spent impulse-scrolling, we give a minute longer than that to God and/or loved ones asap. (I’m not there yet..)

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    2. …. also this left me a bit ‘snapping to get some air’….. or in simple words: It went right over my head! In any case, I consciously have to decide on an hourly, daily basis, what kind of stimuli/info/scaremongering I can take in/digest/is worth my time. So maybe it’s a good thing to have THIS info pass over me.

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      1. Omigosh, things I say never seem too far out there to me, but apparently, some of them are! I’m sorry! I hope it is indeed a good thing! You’ve captured the greater problem in our scrolling/feed, etc: what bad or ill it might do us.

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        1. nah, no prob – just that sometimes (rarely but still….) Dave’s posts are of no (further) help to me. More often he’s super on a topic chosen by him to explore! 😉

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  7. Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
    Wow!! True that!! … “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.” — and more!! – Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Dutton, August 24, 2021).

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