HOW YOUR BRAIN CAN CHEAT ON YOU

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DOPAMINE AND THE SCIENCE OF ADDICTION

Have you ever thought of why you had to check your email inbox all day long in anticipation of a message you ain’t expecting? Or why about 315 million adults are addicted to illicit drug?

Well, for the most part, there is a great deal of congruency in the aforementioned questions - from behavioral addiction to drug addiction, neuroscientists and psychologists have nailed it down to a pleasure chemical called dopamine.

History first: 1954. James Olds and Peter Milner discovered that the stimulation – by electrical voltage – of certain region of a mice brain engendered a ‘strange’ pleasure that galvanized an experimental mice to repeat the same action for hours – pressing the lever that actuates the stimulation. Further experiments with humans lead to the discovery of the reward system and dopamine.

What the heck does this mean? The reward pathway works like this: 1. Receive a signal 2.Take an action (e.g food/internet/video game....) 3. Achieve your goal and get rewarded for it. And guess what? The cycle continues – creating a ‘compulsive loop’. The reward often come in the form of dopamine release into the brain’s pleasure center, making the action pleasurable, and increasing the probability of behavioral alterations in the future.

Now you can guess while illicit drugs can be more addictive than normal actions like eating – the latter can release as much as 10 times dopamine compared to the former.

But does taking these actions really rewards us? This was one of the theme in the book – will power instinct by Kelly McGonigal, a professor at Stanford University. She opined that the reward dopamine promises or gives is a false one, because after engaging in such actions, we do not really feel better about ourselves. In fact, in most cases its the contrary especially if it’s a habit we battling.

This natural process messes with our will power and explains while most of us struggle with will power challenges. This reminds me of the fact that humans are not naturally wired to be successful and explains while only about 1% of the entire population really ‘stand tall’.

Battling with a bad habits? difficult? Quite understandable. Fathoming the simple science of addiction can help increase our awareness – that our brain is about to ‘cheat’ on us – and maybe that will desist us from taking repetitive unsatisfying actions. Creation of ‘physical walls’ between ourselves and our will power challenges also happen to be a helpful tactic.