After the kids stop ringing the doorbell on Halloween, I take the leftover candy out to the garage and put it in the trunk of the car my wife drives. She brings it to work the next day. I just can't sleep knowing there are still uneaten Snickers bars downstairs. :)
> I don't agree that the 20th potato chip tastes significantly worse than the first (sure, above the threshold of noticeability), and the bit about being below the hedonic baseline after finishing is frankly bizarre.
Yeah, I've never experienced this either. Not that I've ever tried to pay attention to such an effect. But I ate a particularly delicious pork chop for lunch today, and the first bite was just as tasty as the last.
I tend to have a threshold where something over that reduces in tastiness. If I eat 5 skittles, they are all delicious. If I eat an entire family-sized bag, I definitely don’t enjoy the last ones as much.
That threshold is food specific, and as I’ve grown older and my general diet has shifted some, I’m less able to find a lot of super sweet stuff continuously enjoyable like I used to.
One thing that helps prolong the good flavors is variation. Alternating tuna fish sandwich and Pringles chips lets me eat much more with continual enjoyment then if I just eat Pringles by themselves.
I’m gonna go get some food now (but I could stop any time I wanted to).
I can’t speak for others, but my process is I start eating, and while there’s still food, I keep eating. If I pause to consider whether I’m hungry or enjoying it, I can easily stop eating in the middle, but it’s not the natural outcome.
Also for me it’s not just junk-food. Same thing happens with baby carrots, cashews, etc. This never struck me as particularly unusual, but maybe it’s just my culture (middle-class American). Learning to not waste food generally means learning you to decouple your hunger and enjoyment from the act of continuing to eat. Once it’s on your plate (or in your hand), it’s getting eaten. I’ve since changed my habits somewhat, but the default is still to just eat food when it’s there ready to eat.
For me, it depends. For sugary foods, I think there absolutely is some declining utility. The first handful of Skittles is great, the 12th can be almost revolting. By contrast, starchy foods or fatty foods, I can eat vast quantities of if my active brain is not monitoring the situation, and yes, I agree the 1st bite and the 15th are pretty similar in goodness. Perhaps this has something to do with differences in the way sugar, fat, and starch are metabolized?
I'll also add: I think it depends on how hungry I am, too. If I'm reeeeally hungry, those first few bites are very pleasing, and then there's a bit of a drop off to pretty good. By contrast, if I'm only moderately hungry, the entire meal is likely to only be moderately pleasing.
Same here. I feel great after a delicious meal, and I find it tasty until the end. I'm eating the last of a dessert right now and I'm trying to eat mindfully and... Yep, still delicious.
I have the same experience with food. I was interested to see if there would be more people out there who didn't experience it in at all the way Scott described above, and it's somewhat reassuring to find out that this was indeed the case.
Having established that there is a sub-set of the population that experiences food differently, could we find out if that sub-set also experiences addiction at different rates or in different ways? Could that be linked to some kind of chemistry or brain structure? Probably quite interesting to do...
One of the things I treasure most about the comments here is the constant reinforcement that people are really different from each other. "... guilt trip you get when you decide to get high way too early in the day?" I know of 2 people who, every day, smoked a fat one for breakfast. One ran a computer networking consulting company, the other was president of a large metropolitan hospital.
Works even better with the allegedly more accurate translations (I don't know Sanskrit or Pali) as "unsatisfactoriness" or similar. The claim that all desire (and life, for that matter) is suffering always struck me as a bit extreme, but saying it's all ultimately somewhat unsatisfying rings much more intuitively true to me.
It also jibes with what we would expect from the kind of motivational- and reward system resulting from blind evolution, as opposed to a superintelligence-level engineer who might code in actual goal states:
"Alright, you have done/accumulated/consumed enough of X to reach the optimal level Y, so you shall now be granted a feeling of perfect satisfaction regarding X until it drops below the minimum maintenance level (with safety margin) Z, at which point you shall again start to feel unsatisfied with the amount of X in your life.
That's far too fiddly and context-dependent for evolution (at least when it comes to the kind of vague, not immediately survival-determining things discussed here), so the system we got instey just goes:
"Good job, you've done/accumulated/consumed some X, that's great, have a pat on the back, well done you... but was it *enough* X?'
PS: I can't remember where I read it; I think it was some blog in the... let's call it rationality-adjacent spirituality sphere?
...anyway, the author put forth their personal "not in any way linguistically derived, but intuitive-feeling modern english"-"translation" of dukkha:
Basically "a (bit of a) bummer".
I personally found that very fitting.
Just try mentally substituting that whenever something is described as "dukkha", or "suffering" in a spiritual sense :)
I have that book on my shelf (or rather, in one of the stacks of books for lack of shelf space), but haven't yet read it (though I've listened to one or two interviews with the author about it).
I expect it to be the kind of book that doesn't give me loads of new insights, but a better understanding of, and foundation for, my own views, and likely in the form of much more well-constructed and refined arguments than I could spontaneously generate myself.
Because when asked about my beliefs on a lot of religious/spiritual/metaphysical topics, my answers usually boil down to "basically some form of Buddhism, without any of the parts that seem to be remnants of its cultural history*; but it's still very much a work in progress"
*eg deva realms and suchlike
**wait, that's roughly what's being referred to as "secular Buddhism", isn't it? I'm not in an English-speaking country
And why wouldn't evolution set us up like that, given that it's only in the last few thousand years maybe that humans have been able to build up adequate reserves of wealth to not be at constant threat of running out by the end of next winter or next dry season. The places where this isn't true, tropical places with calm weather and plentiful easy food, seem to have produced people with a much more relaxed demeanor.
I have no actual statistical research, only anecdote and personal experience, but your intuition about this definitely matches my experience of the world, and in particular it is why I swore off online gaming after spending three months becoming increasingly obsessed with a text based MUD in college -- I realized that I was on a bad trajectory, quit, and decided henceforth I would only engage with forms of gaming that had some kind of end-point I could reach. With a truly excellent game, like Breath of the Wild, there is definitely a let-down when it's done, and also some reflection on "was spending all that time on that worth it?" It takes a month or two of returning to spending that spare time on other stuff to "balance out" and be able to really decide for sure whether I think the game was a worthy work of art -- as worth spending time on as reading a novel or watching a long narrative TV show -- or whether it was just a rabbit hole that kinda wasted several dozen hours of my life (and so I should maybe be more discriminating about what game I pick up next, listen to reviewers who were negative on that one, etc).
I will add here that with the online game, the combination of competitive and collaborative elements of the game were a big part of the problem. You wanted to help out your friends in the game, not let them down; and you wanted to compete for status. It's a kind of hijacking of normal human social drives. The grind of that made it all-consuming. You'd be doing anything else, and thinking, "but I could be earning internet points right now." It was not healthy behavior and it was already causing my grades and real-life social relationships to slip after just a few months... I also, anecdotally, know a couple of relationships that dissolved because one of the two people disappeared into EverQuest... Some of this behavior definitely meets the "causes problems in the rest of your life, and you don't change the behavior even though you acknowledge it's hurting you" aspect of how "addiction" gets defined.
I've had a number of similar experiences. My newer approach is to only do entertainment activities that I find fun, and only while I'm having fun with it. It's been weird to stop reading books halfway through or not finish video games (even ones with clear endings), but I find myself enjoying my free time much more that way. I used to push myself to finish a book that was not very good, or finish a video game just because, long after I stopped enjoying the actual play of it.
On what I think is a related note, I also try to eat more varied foods and can in fact each just one or a few chips. Last night I wanted a snack, and got three bites of three different flavors. I highly recommend that, over eating a bunch of one item. I had not thought about it before this post, but I'm pretty sure Scott's right that the enjoyment per bite fades the more you eat the same thing. Three delicious flavors as individual bites really maximizes the enjoyment of each, and you can save the rest for later.
Food Wars (anime) makes a comment that gourmet food is delicious on the first bite, sometimes overwhelmingly so, whereas diner food is meant to hit its peak after a few bites and develop a craving.
My experience with high quality snacks/desserts vs low cost ones tends to agree.
I’ve been using Blue Apron for a few years. Their consistently best genre of meal utilizes this principle. It’s some sort of grain bowl where you make four or five items (eg, boil some farro, mix some yogurt and lemon zest and olive oil into a sauce, quick pickle some onions in vinegar and sugar, while roasting a vegetable) and then mix them all up. Each bite has a different mix of these flavors, and they’re all somewhat distinctive flavors, so every bite is delicious until the end. The only problem is the number of dishes you have to wash at the end.
The thing is, I still at least _think_ I am enjoying a game, through to the end, because a well-designed game has that whole dopamine-hit structure of challenge and reward. It's very hard to objectively judge whether it was overall _good_ until you're out of that loop.
I definitely do the thing you're talking about with food, though. I think somebody else in the thread mentioned just getting multiple samples of ice cream rather than an entire scoop... I've been to some shops where you can get something like a single-scoop cup but with five tiny scoops.
A lot of games tend to morph over time into more complex games. There are more options to choose from, the difficulty of the game goes up, and the rewards become less frequent per time spent in the game. The alternative to slower rewards is very fast completion - which used to be quite common! Games from the 80s could sometimes be beat in 15 minutes, even if the typical playthrough would normally take a few hours (Contra, Mario 1). In more modern games, there is a tendency to want to give players the option to keep going. This makes sense and isn't weird, but it does mean that the "end game" content plays differently than the first half. I find that I enjoy the beginnings of games fairly well, and the middle of games quite well, but don't enjoy the ending phase. A lot of games do still have a "basic finish" victory where you do the main quests and defeat the final boss on the easiest difficulty. If I play a game like that, I will still usually finish it and enjoy the whole game. Games where there are numerous side quests throughout that have an important effect on the rest of the game (or the game feels very incomplete without it) tend to turn me off and I either don't play them or stop before reaching the end.
I also would say I definitely was having fun with the MUD -- I liked the folks I was playing with, I even went to a real-world meetup. The problem was just that I couldn't play it _a little_. Either I was going to play it obsessively for hours every night, or not at all.
I also played Ingress for a few years, with a strict rule for myself of not car-gressing for day-to-day play -- only bike, walk, trail hike, etc. Drive places only for organized operations. That way the addictive quality drove pro-social and healthy behavior. And I played it hardcore enough that I turned up in the New York Times when they profiled the game. When it stopped being fun for me, I stopped.
I don't exactly understand _why_ I lose control over regulating how much time I put into something like that, but I plainly do. Hence why I will never, ever pick up something like WoW or FF XIV. I would lose a few years of my life to it if I did, and might lose my job and my spouse along the way. :-P
I had moderate problems with losing control over regulating my time. For me, I could trace it very specifically to a formula - How much time it takes to progress at the rate I felt was appropriate. That could be levels gained, or quests/dungeons completed, or whatever. I felt a desire to maintain a certain linear amount of growth, and would spend enough time per week to gain that much. Part of the issue is that levels and quests take more time the further into the game you get. Going from level 1 to level 2 often takes only a few minutes, whereas gaining late game levels could take multiple hours of play. Also, when you level up quickly you can often find and wear new gear or other rewards, so you're getting those hits faster. By end game you may spend hours getting little to no reward. Playing an MMO in end game raids could often take hours to get a few drops to split between 20-100 people. The average person in the raid would likely spend 4+ hours to get between nothing and a minimal upgrade, with a handful getting a substantial upgrade. I stopped playing WoW (10+ years ago) when I was spending 2-3 nights a week playing 4+ hours a night and making very little progression. The guild wanted me to play more, and I could see how I could progress in other areas if I played a few more nights per week, and realized it was a trap. It bothered me at first, but gaining 10-20 hours a week to spend on other priorities definitely was the right choice over maybe gaining one or two gear upgrades, once I got over the sunk cost of all the time put into my character. That was the real insight for me, not thinking in terms of sunk costs but in terms of current and future enjoyment. Based on that realization, I tend to think about whether I will enjoy the full game before I purchase it or start to play it. Often the truth is that to fully play a game might take 40 hours, of which only 20 is truly enjoyable. If the game is cheap enough I might buy it to play for 20 hours, or I might just skip it.
Yeah, your point about the nature of late-game MMOs is exactly the thing I consider toxic / borderline-immoral about them. Like, they hijack a pro-social instinct -- you want to collaborate with your guild-mates -- and turn it into behavior that is unhealthy for the participants. Like, even spending two hours on gaming every day is _kind of a lot!_ When I was spending a couple hours on Ingress after work in the evening, and more on weekends, at least that meant I also was getting some exercise.
(Had already written most of this before I saw Kenny make a similar comment further down, though much more concise.)
That's basically what high-class restaurants do: not only do they serve meals ranging from something like 5 at the low end to double digits at the high end;
but the individual courses themselves not uncommonly consist of several individual food items that could be considered distinct dishes in their own right (eg in German-speaking countries I've often seen courses named things like "Dreierlei vom Schwein", which is a fancy way of saying "three different preparations of pork", and which are then separate small items on the plate).
At these kinds of meals, the individual items are often of a size that they can be eaten in about 2-3 bites, aka a single "hungry American" bite. Often, only the most central main course have food that requires more bites. Oh, and soup and such is am exception.
And *then* you have "tasting menus", where the whole point is that the entire meal consists of many individual "dishes" in portions that are designed to be eaten in a single, or at most two, bites. Those often have a somewhat less insane number of courses, maybe even downright normal (like, 4! can you imagine!) making up for it ny having a much more insane number of individual dishes per plate. I don't think I've personally seen a course with double digits dishes per plate, but that's probably mostly because it starts to look messy.
Recently I'm trying to follow the advice beeing mindfull to not overeat or overdrink (Alkohol). Was it here at Scott's or somewhere else where I learned that tastefull food and beverages lead to overconsumption - they told this might be aain cause of syndrome x around the globe. In our family we switched from sweet beaver ages to tap water and from white bread with marmelade or chocolate to whole grain bread with cheese. We all consume much less of the unsweetened, whole stuff compared with limonade or white bread with marmelade. It's just not so tasty and seems to prevent overeating. I guess on of the reasons that porridge is so good for not getting overweight is that it's so bad in taste if it's without fruits, sweets or so.
So long story short: I try to prevent or reduce a high consumption due to deliciousness...
> I would only engage with forms of gaming that had some kind of end-point I could reach.
Sadly, the incentives of the game producers seem to evolve in the opposite direction. Internet (ads and microtransactions) made it profitable to keep you playing as long as possible. Not doing that would feel like leaving money on the table.
Possible exception, if you are already planning to make a sequel. Then you at some moment want to give the player a happy ending, so that they can buy the next game.
Yeah, the shift towards treating games as a subscription service is unfortunate, though of course I understand the economic incentives behind it. When I read about Ubisoft's plan for creating "Assassin's Creed Infinite", as an ongoing updated service, I was just like, "welp, I guess when I finish Valhalla, I won't be playing any more AC."
As someone who has, for example, stayed up until four am on a school night two nights in a row reading a new comic series, I have expressed my love for art/books to be "at times bordering on addiction". However, although stopping might be very difficult, if there are several hours in between stopping and resuming, the urge to resume is much, much smaller.
I think it has something to do with which next 'want' is brought to the forefront of your mind when you are doing a task. There are many many things a human wants in their life but your attention can only really sit on one at a time. By eating a potato chip it fetches the want of "I want a potato chip" from the set of all wants and puts it front and center in your mind. Then it becomes both the thing you really want to act on next (cause its what sits in your attention at that moment) and it also feels bad when someone or something stops that want from being fulfilled (mum takes the bag of chips from you or turns off the tv when your 'movie want' is at the forefront of your attention)
I guess to add to this a flow state could kind of be thought of as a long chain of 'wants' which fetch the same 'want' from the pool of things you could want and brings it to your attention over and over. That's why often it can be hard to start 'flow' activities like say painting (as thinking of and focusing the first want is hard), but once you have started then the activity of painting makes you want to paint in the next moment and so on leading you to end up in a really content flow state where you can suddenly paint happily for hours.
Pretty sure addiction means the offending activity negatively impacts your living, you’re aware -although denial can exist- and you continue to engage in the behavior despite established risks/consequences. I don’t think watching a movie in one sitting equates.
Well, if you're getting angry that someone said hi while you were watching a movie, there's a problem, but it's not the interruption, it's the weird tendency to anger.
Staying up late, well past the point of reasonableness, is pretty common for people watching TV/Movies, reading books, or playing video games. It's also something that we are well aware of the negative effects and we continue to do it. Does that not meet the criteria?
Somewhat related: if I'm craving ice cream I'll trick myself by going into the shop and getting a couple sample spoons to satisfy the craving, then leaving. Or at the frozen yogurt-by-weight places, I'lll get like $0.90 worth of frozen yogurt.
Do true idols have a different effect? Would be interesting to see some evidence in their favor, given that parting the seas and such seems to be out of fashion these days.
They sure do! It won't work for you if you don't genuinely believe (which makes a real scientific experiment difficult, if not impossible), but all of the traditional spiritual disciplines have the effect of lessening the power of addiction in a person's life. Fasting and tithing especially have this effect. Ask Christians how it feels to give something up for Lent. Muslims have Ramadan, I'm sure it's similar. Buddhists seem to have a practice of not eating after noon which I'll bet does the same thing. In fact, it's interesting to consider Buddhism in light of this post -- it seems like the world religion which addresses the problem of addiction the most directly.
I think you need to reanalyze that. Genuine belief is, itself, an addiction. It causes motivated reasoning that is impervious to evidence. This is why even the "flying spaghetti monster" is a trifle dangerous. Consider that there are actually people who believe the "birds aren't real" conspiracy. And they don't switch out of it even though it negatively affects their lives. Now consider that your favorite belief may be of the same nature. Perhaps it doesn't, or you believe it doesn't, negatively affect your life, but it's probably the same method in action.
It was created as a joke. Then some folks started believing in it. I don't know how many, but the point was that even really silly things can attract some folks who believe them. And once they believe, they are relatively immune to contrary evidence.
I'll fully admit to being biased, as I'm a spiritual person, but I think that once you start defining philosophical positions as "addictions", you've watered down and distorted the usage of the word far beyond the point of usefulness. A devout Christian or atheist is only comparable to a heroin addict if you're trying to take some kind of weird maximally-skeptical position.
No. It's valuable if you consider addiction a process with a gradient from trivial so strongly controlling. This implies that one is trying to model the processes of thought and action (whether or not successfully). So for me that's a valid meaning of addiction. Other purposes might (and do) reasonably use other definitions of addiction.
A devout Christian or atheist is a reasonably called an addict (to that belief) to the extent that their thought processes follow the same pattern. There are obvious similarities, but it's not really clear to me that the mechanism is the same. OTOH, it's certainly not clear that the mechanism is entirely different. There are multiple levels of similarity
That said, we don't really know enough about the internal mechanics to assert that they are the same. Only that they have certain reaction patterns in common. This could be because they use the same reinforcement mechanism, but there might be other reasons, though I haven't thought of any.
FWIW, I, also, consider myself a spiritual person, though not in any standard religion (including atheism as a religion). And I *do* have trouble applying this idea to my own religion. But I model this as the difficulty a hand has in bandaging itself rather than thinking it implies that the idea is wrong.
I think the issue is simpler: trying to analyze the spiritual and emotional with pure rationality is like trying to dissect a dog to find out why you love it. You might find out a lot about how the dog's body works, but not only will you fail to find your answer, you're also running the risk of destroying the thing you're trying to save.
I'll fully admit that, despite posting here, I'm not a hardcore rationalist. I think rationality is useful in some areas, but I also believe, quite strongly, that humans are too complex for simple solutions or explanations to accurately describe them- and "everything you like works just like addiction" is a VERY simple explanation. The fact it's also an insanely dangerous piece of psychic technology is besides the point.
Would you then say that other "moral" positions are also "addictions" with similar effect? Prohibitions on defrauding people or murder, are addictions as well?
I can kind of squint and see that maybe we are "addicted" (using the definition closer to Scott's post) to philosophical and moral positions, and would continue to pursue them even when they're not rationally optimal. I'm not sure I see the value in such a position if it also applies to strong positions that are generally seen as quite important for society.
I'm currently looking into "Dopamine fasting", which is what it's come to be called in certain circles when you abstain from cheap sources of pleasure, whether or not it's a misnomer (though it seems plausible enough to me) in order to combat being "below baseline" when you're supposed to be doing other things (e.g. working, or enjoying time with your family).
The idea is that if you're below baseline due to splurging on cheap pleasures, you won't be able to be motivated or enjoy work or leisure - and after the initial fun, you're not even really enjoying the addictive behaviours you get cheap pleasure from either.
I used to think that browsing Reddit in my free time was totally harmless - like, I was t being productive but it was my free time so that's ok. But the talk around dopamine fasting and the like has now got me thinking that I am damaging my motivation systems when I indulge in these things, and they might be contributing to procrastination and motivation issues generally.
I've experimented with leaving my phone outside my bedroom, trying to read books more instead of Reddit, and those sorts of things, and think I have seen some limited success. I haven't taken it to the extreme yet, but am considering taking it further.
What really helped was when internetting became more boring once the pandemic (which I was obsessed with) was waning here in Australia. I was really productive at work after that. Now with the war in Ukraine Im once again...well, addicted to keeping up with the news. It really feels like an addiction in every relevant way.
Many religions have practices of abstaining from easy pleasures, and I take it seriously when there's a confluence of ancient wisdom and modern science, even if it's a bit of heterodox science that isn't very solid yet.
Interested in anyone else's experiences on this topic.
I think dopamine fasting is indeed a misnomer, and it partly stems from the general miscomprehension of the role of dopamine, but more importantly from our mislabeling and whitewashing of the modern vices.
Browsing social media, reddit, news seems innocuous on the face of it - you're just keeping informed! - but in reality, it's effectively gambling.
You're betting away your focus on the chance that you'll come across something that registers as "important". These algorithms are built like slots machines, drip feeding you content that's designed to engage, but only for very short periods of time; like potato chips, they are inherently limited in their ability to satiate you, precisely because their purveyors don't want you to stop.
I think "cheap pleasures" is also a misnomer that fails to convey the risks associated with them. The cheapness has nothing to do with value, cost or pleasure potential, but with focus and agency. Mindless pleasures, or pathological flow states, could be the better term: indulging in a bag of chips or a stream of content means surrendering your agency, turning on an autopilot designed by someone with a profit motive.
I believe the deeper we delve into our flow states the more we thrive, and in contrast, we're at our worst when we're scattered and anchorless. Greatness is achieved through persistence, but very little gets done by very little efforts.
No. Flow states are great for accomplishing a defined objective. But to be creative requires a combination of scattered and focused. These can't usually be done at the same time.
This doesn't mean I consider Reddit a good source of unfocused attention. Actually, I suspect even solitaire is better, preferably one of the mindless varieties where you just perform simple actions, and there is no good strategy. This can be what you put your focus on while the rest of your mind free associates.
Often, though, it's better to rapidly switch back and forth between focused and scattered. Rapidly here is often in the order of magnitude of once a minute.
"Dopamine fasting" is a case of a broken clock being right twice a day. The neuroscience and the psychology behind it is hot garbage, however, if you attempt it you'll accidentally remove a lot of non-obvious poison from your life. I suppose it's like mental elimination diet.
Reddit, news, discord etc. are mental junk food. It is difficult to limit their consumption but the upside is absolutely massive - I'm experimenting with a mostly async way of engaging with them, checking them at predetermined times of my day, and I freed up so. much. time. and mental energy it's unreal.
The framing I'd choose is that relaxing is also a skill and we're becoming increasingly terrible at it, starting with the invention of TV.
The exact neurotransmitter in question that you're trying to manipulate is outside my ken, but I think it's clear that what happens with the combination of smartphones and social media companies that make more money the longer they hold your attention, this stimulus affects the brain somehow or other, and can have certain negative effects on people's behavior, mood, attention span, ability to concentrate, etc. I think it's wise to find some means of self-regulation in this regard, whatever name you want to attach to it.
An observation, or thought experiment isn't 'heterodox science' its 'a hypothesis.'
This is the foundation of science, when you take some observations and try to draw a conclusion, take your hypothesis to your friends, and ask them their ideas on your hypothesis.
Hypo meaning 'under' or 'less than', and thesis being your argument. Its not a fully developed argument, but an under developed argument ... hypothesis.
When you've provided some good boundaries, you can promote your hypo-thesis to a theory, then banter about The DoubleUnPlussed Theory of Dopamine Fasting whilst chatting up chicks in the bar.
Actually, heroin is not pleasurable for most people when they first try it and the overwhelming majority of people who try heroin never get addicted. In fact, most who try the drug don’t even like it. Dan Rather, the former CBS anchorman, famously shot up heroin in the 1950s for a news story. Yet despite taking the drug, the reporter says heroin only gave him a “hell of a headache.” Rather’s reaction is not unique.
A 2012 study on healthy volunteers found that some 15 percent of people given an opioid reported a strong dislike of it. 50 percent of test subjects reported mixed results, neither strongly liking or disliking the sensation. Only 30 percent of people in the study found the sensation to be pleasant. Of those reporting that the drug made them feel good, only half said they would want to experience it again. That’s a pretty poor showing for the world’s most addictive substance.
Clearly, there's more to addiction than the substance being abused. I think you're right on the money saying it's an awareness problem.
It’s dangerous to medicalize normal behavior. I’m skeptical about social media addiction as a wide ranging disorder. I’m sure some people get addicted to over using social media just as some people get addicted to just about any analgesic. However, the same can be said about a “friend addiction.” In many ways, focusing our attention on a product’s addictiveness, can make us want it more, as in the case of potato chips per Scott’s example.
It *is* dangerous, but that's because we don't really understand the medical part. It's also obviously correct, if done properly. You couldn't be alive without a huge number of medical processes (well, chemical, but that's much of what medicine manipulates). And, yes, friend addiction is just as really a medical/chemical process. There are two species of vole on different sides of a river. One species is monogamous and the other doesn't have family ties. They are EXTREMELY closely related. The major (known) difference between them is in their dopamine chemistry.
But biochemistry is fiendishly complicated, with all sorts of interactions that nobody can predict. That's why "medialize normal behavior" is dangerous. Because we tend to do it incorrectly. But it's obviously true, when done correctly. And it clearly governs social behaviors just as it governs more physical behaviors, like allergies. And note that in calling it biochemistry I'm oversimplifying it, as there are also, e.g., structural effects, that equally can be considered medical.
AFAIK, heroin, like other opiates, is a pain killer. Pain killers are often effective against mental pains, as, e.g., social rejection. So I would suspect that its effectiveness is only strong against those in some kind of pain. Not necessarily physical pain.
FWIW, and IIRC, and if I trust my source, heroin was originally marketed as a non-addictive cough suppressing syrup. And they'd run tests to prove that it was non-addictive. (But the sample size was around 12 or 25 people.)
... I remember seeing it was named Heroin because it makes you feel like a Hero.
I really have no connection to it other than I had a friend whose wife and her sisters ... a total drug den there ... the wife would visit her sisters, use some heroin, then someone would call my friend, he'd go pick up his wife, completely wasted, raped—by whomever provided the heroin I guess ... my friend would bring her home, dump her on the living room floor where she'd lay for a day or so until she came out of it ... we'd just step over her.
When she did come out of it, there was the "you're never going to go back to your sister's again fight." But of course she wants to visit her sisters, and she promises to not take heroin ... lather, rinse, repeat.
What a disaster. I haven't seen them for 25 years, no desire to.
I took an opioid on a dare when I was 15 or so. My friend did too. We didn't even know what they were. I forgot I took it and mentioned about an hour later that I had never felt better in my life.
I suddenly realized "maybe this was the pill?" and Googled to find out what it was. I never looked back: my mission in life became "acquire opioids" from that moment forward.
I'm on buprenorphine maintenance now because I will absolutely, 100%, not even going to try to resist it, go get some heroin without it.
My friend, on the other hand, didn't really feel any different. I wonder if there's something biological there.
I agree that there is something biological there. The first time I smoked a cigarette & felt the nicotine hit, I thought "this is great! Where has this been all my life!" Was up to a pack a day within a couple weeks, smoked for years, and had a terrible time quitting. Even now, 20 years after quitting, I sometimes have dreams about smoking. But I've never had significant trouble with going overboard with alcohol or weed, both of which I've used socially for most of my adult life, or with cocaine, which I've tried a few times, or with opioids, which I've been prescribed a few times for pain.
I got opioids once, recently, when I needed something for a bad toothache and pharmacist gave me sth with codeine. I was surprised it's not prescription-only.
I was really curious what the effects would be; but it turned out not only that there were none; it didn't even help against the pain.
I write movies for a living and have worked on games too. For what it’s worth, the “flow state” you’re describing isn’t a neurological accident - it’s the point of (what might seem like) overly prescriptive story structures and “Save The Cat”-style formulas. The entertainment industry has been trying to figure out how to induce this state for a hundred years. It’s a moving target, but it’s not at all unintentional.
I'd like to repost a reply (I think?) somebody deleted: "Every storytelling medium tries to capture its audience's attention- that's what divides a good story from a mediocre one. Not unique to films, and certainly not sinister unless we want to venture deep into the weeds of 'everything is manipulation and abuse'." I agree with this and think I probably made this value proposition sound overly sinister in my initial comment.
I should have said entertainment rather than "entertainment value". Flow states should be used to accomplish something desirable. Admittedly "desirable" is rather vague, but playing a game is not, in and of itself, desirable. Neither is watching a movie. (Or reading a book, which is my vice.) They are only desirable in terms of their external effects. Relaxing a tense feeling is inherently desirable (though not always wise). Accomplishing a specified goal is inherently desirable (though others may disagree). But "capturing a Pokemon" isn't accomplishing any goal external to the game. So it is at most only desirable to the extent that the game itself is desirable.
Now if one talks of basketball or some such, the game provides exercise and various other skills that transfer external to the game. This is much less true of a computer game, and a LOT less true of a movie.
IOW, entertainment is only valuable to the extent that it has effects external to the entertainment. Those can be mental, physical, or some combination. When "flow states" are manipulated to pure entertainment, then it is hijacking an expensive process. It they could train the experiencer to induce flow states when needed, it would be valuable rather than hijacking.
I mean no disrespect, but I strongly disagree with "entertainment is only valuable to the extent that it has effects external to the entertainment."
Let's say the baseline goal is "enjoyment." Way below that goal is "I hated it or was bored" and way above that goal is "it gave me a new perspective I could apply to other areas of my life" or "I watched Green Book and it helped me Solve Racism (or whatever)." I think you've got to prioritize engaging with art for its own sake. That's why art is a distinct category from exercise, self-improvement, scholarship, etc. Your subjective emotional or intellectual reaction is *the point,* and not a middleman for whatever that reaction helps you achieve after you've experienced it.
This creates difficult areas of abstraction - I'd have to make a subjective case for why I thought 5 seasons of Breaking Bad were more "valuable" to me than 5 seasons of reality television - but that abstraction is where the beauty lies. When asked why they play, a basketball player might say "it keeps me in great shape" or "it's how I acquire money/awards/fame/whatever." But they could also just say "I love playing basketball." That would make sense too.
Art that is self-contained and has no external effects isn't art.
There are lots of subtle external effects that count as external effects, including giving someone a new perspective on something. Actually, that's the main thing that causes something to qualify as art, and is why many works of art will repay intense study. Consider "Metropolis" and the comment it makes on the relationship between people and powered machinery. Or StarWars, and the commentary it makes on the relationship between people and authority. (I don't have to agree with the message to recognize it.)
To say "I play basketball because I love it." would explain why they play it, but it wouldn't justify it. Many people like things that I strongly disapprove of, like harming unwilling subjects. Basketball has certain features that DO justify it. To me they don't act strongly enough that I'm willing to play it, but this doesn't mean they don't exist. I count relaxation in various senses as a plausible external effect for many works of entertainment, and if that's all they do, then I attribute to them the value of that relaxation. But if they are just time swallowers, then even if they are attractive I don't consider them to have ANY value. The value of an entertainment is solely determined by its external effects. If it's only effect is to induce additional time and effort to be spent on that entertainment, then it is of negative value.
I want to preface this by saying I do not mean this as an insult: are you on the autism spectrum? I only ask because your mode of thinking is so completely divorced from the way the average human being thinks that the first explanation that pops into my head is that you're neurodivergent. I suspect that this is some kind of "intentional living" thing, but honestly the worldview you're espousing seems bloodless and mechanical. I can't imagine someone feeling actual happiness if they spend all of their time thinking like this.
Here's my question: is watching a sunrise acceptable by your heuristic? Not painting it or happening to see it while doing something else, just existing and watching the sunrise.
I'm surprised to find myself agreeing with you, but with a lot of missing content that I think you believe but didn't say.
Specifically, that "external effects" can be a huge number of things and may in fact exist so extensively that no one here truly disagrees with you. You did include relaxation, which is pretty big towards what most people use entertainment for. Especially if relaxation means more than just "I'm too stressed out to work, so here's a good way to take a break so I can work more later." Once you've crossed that Rubicon there may not be much disagreement left.
I have been on both sides of this coin, playing games for the sake of themselves as a teen versus now always thinking "What lasting effect do I get out of it?"
I'd get really excited about a game and pour in thousands of hours and unlock lots of progression (with varying neutral-to-negative effects on the rest of my life), then I'd eventually move on to another game. But I realized, after I moved on to another game, all the progression I'd done in the first didn't really matter to me anymore. What lasted was the other parts of my life I'd neglected, plus whatever experiences in the game made a lasting impression on me.
Now as an adult, I am much more focused on real-world goals like "keep my job", "marry my fiance", "save up and buy a house", etc, and I realize that fully immersing myself in a game is not how to obtain them. I still do play some, but now I think much more about the long term and what effect it will have on my out-of-game life.
yes, but this also applies to every form of human communication. Why do we write—arguably witty—blog posts, comments, sing songs, tell stories, etc. We do it to entertain our friends ... but sometimes we hire professional entertainers to entertain our friend, or ourselves ... which eventually leads to people like Antioch having a profession writing witty stories for production—cause—we want it enough, we'll pay for it.
You explain why its' done, but not why it is desirable that it be done. Communication is only valuable to the extent that it has some valuable effect external to that communication. In evolutionary time a main value was to strengthen the social bonds that held the tribe (well, group) together. Secondarily it could transfer useful information.
Lacking direct contact, the main purpose served by, e.g., this blog is to transfer useful information, with a secondary purpose of connecting a group of people. (It's secondary because the effect is so weak when there's no personal interaction.)
But the instincts that reinforce this behavior were evolved in evolutionary time, and the current situation is very different. So we end up desiring lots of things that are, at best, not really adaptive. Like things that are pure entertainment.
There is no reason to value anything over anything else. Saying "entertainment is the only valuable thing" is just as correct as what you're saying. I would suggest providing a context: valuable *for what purpose* — reproduction? The comments about evolution appear to indicate that you're identifying with your genes. But that's no more valid than someone who evaluates everything through pleasure or paperclips.
I think there's a third reason (blogging has value) it provides intellectual stimulation. Take this thread for instance, you brought up some very valid points, points which I had never considered before ... then I provide this third point, because your first two points didn't fully satisfy my ... (feelings, thoughts, desires) on why I read blogs.
So yes, I'm paying Freddie for the intellectual stimulation I receive in viewing, and exchanging ideas with others of like (or unlike) but open minds.
That one *is* tricky. I tend to consider "intellectual stimulation" a bet that "there's stuff there that will be useful in the future", but perhaps that doesn't cover everything. OTOH, if the residue is just "entertainment", then perhaps that residue isn't intrinsically valuable. (I.e., perhaps it's attractive because of evolutionary artifacts, but those artifacts aren't appropriate to the current environment.) So in that case I wouldn't consider that segment of "intellectual stimulation" valuable.
And note that part of why I'm responding is that it helps me clarify my own thoughts on the subject. I think of that as a bet that it will eventually be useful, but I could be wrong. (Not "I could lose that bet.", which is clearly true, but rather I might be misattributing why I'm doing it.)
Clearly I don't always analyze things this way. Normally I just follow my desires and do things that feel right, even if were I to analyze them I'd decide that they weren't valuable. Sometimes I clearly feel that the actions aren't valuable, but I do them anyway. (Often I'll get stuck in, e.g., computer solitaire, and know that I'm not getting anything of value out of it, but I'm stuck anyway. Other times it's a valuable defocusing mechanism, to allow non-central thoughts to float into consciousness and be evaluated, and perhaps developed.)
Anecdotally, I think the days/hours when I can find something so engrossing that I can hone in on it and notice until it's 4am are the best I have. Much of my life is quite monotonous, but if a new (or new to me) video game or book catches my eye in that special way, I give in as much as possible and just savor the ride while avoiding destroying other facets of my life. Certainly during those days I look dangerously addicted, but I know that the root cause is always fleeting novelty of the new experience that will quickly and naturally fade out, so I enjoy it while I can without being worried about a long term issue. It's rare enough that it never chains back to back.
I think the difference between my experience and a drug addict's is not the hyperfocus or enjoyment itself, but rather that I am fortunate that my poison comes with a rough but extant expiration date where it will no longer be interesting to me, and I just walk away. For an addict, this is where the chemical dependency kicks in and locks them into the miserable cycle
I have heard Andrew Huberman describe the journey of addiction (substance or otherwise) as a progressive narrowing of one's interests, and I find this to be pretty accurate.
I like that description as a starting point. I'd refine it by pointing out that the narrowing is usually a resultant outcome of addiction-driven behaviour. You start habitually smoking weed, and initially you assume that all the other stuff you do can seamlessly coexist with that habit; then you realise that being stoned makes you suck at talking to people at parties, so you go to less and less parties; you realise that being high makes it easier to watch movies instead of read novels, so you read less novels; go to the gym less; etc etc.
Your field of interest narrows, but often as a result of your becoming aware of how your wider interests are made difficult by being a drug user. It's a passive narrowing.
Chimes with Marc Lewis's work (See The Biology of Desire) and various other cognitive science people, and I think Buddha, sort of. Addiction being not a problem of compulsive desire, but one of narrowing of vision.
Also, that Frito-Lay tagline, "betcha can't eat just one", sounds like a conditional prediction market advocating definitively for eating zero potato chips. "Frito-Lay: eat zero or eat the whole damn bag -- there's no middle ground!"
And my obligatory comment that I suppose this all bodes well for Beeminder's future.
Basically, addiction has less to do with the magical quality of the substance and more to do with how the person approaches it and the quality of the environment. I read about a rat study in Civilized to Death the other day. The gist is that the researchers gave the rats access to sugary and heroin-laced water. Those rats that were placed in an environment with other rats and cool leisure possibilities (like rat wheels, tunnels, and whatnot) drank very little of the water and none of them overdosed. In contrast those rats who were deprived of all these earthly perks coped by drug-laced water, with all the consequences it entails. All this to say - I think people already caught up on the idea that addiction is more encompassing than making the dopamine system hyperactive (although that might still be the major component). Which begs the question: what do meaningful experiences (however you want to define them) posses that make us prefer them over a snortful of heroin?
Maybe there is a secondary, less immediate and less primitive reward system for "status" ( here I mean it in a very broad sense linked to progressive improvement: accumulation of social status, expertise, wealth, even physical self-improvement through training).
This is super important for humans which are intelligent social animals with a lot of plasticity, so this kind of long-ish term progress count a lot and evolution must have found ways to promote it, but it's also not so easy to immediately measure so maybe there is a more subtle/more abstract reward system at play, either in // or controlling the simple dopamine one.
Difficult to measure, but indeed it would predict simple addictions to be more of a problem where long term status is not modifiable, either because it does not exists (rats for example may be a little bit like humans, while non-plastic solitary animals should be instant addicts) or because the environment is such that nothing affect your "status" (trapped in low or high "status" that can not be affected by your actions, which obviously happen once isolated for example)
Cool! thanks for linking that. Upon closer inspection, I don't think the thesis Scott proposed there and what I wrote differ that much. Quoting one of his concluding paragraphs: " But if having a happy family and doing meaningful work and so on are, I don’t know, a quarter as rewarding as heroin, then maybe you have an opportunity to use “““willpower””” to force yourself the rest of the way and take the only-a-quarter-as-rewarding option. If you have a crappy life that doesn’t have any other source of reward at all, then all the “““willpower””” in the world won’t save you."
But to be more precise in my claims: my first line reads "quality of environment" which refers to the rat study. But later on I generalize to "meaningful experiences", which is what I implicitly assume the environment provided for the rats.
Interesting. I think the examples Scott give some credit to my just-so story (I don't dare to write theory ;-): It's not being well off that protect, in fact it can be as dangerous as having nothing to loose, if you are so well off that your "status" will not bulge with addiction. This was clearly the case with Ogedei and quite a lot of celebrities, at least until the late stages of addiction. While if you are middle class, your status may take a hit quite early. I also think the genetic explanation is the main one (that's a very safe bet to explain any variation within a population or between populations anyway, nothing original here) but a the long term, status-focused reward system specific to plastic slow maturing social animals would be my go-to explanation for non-genetic effects, if any.
That's tricky. "non-genetic effects" can't exist. So what you're thinking of is variation in a genetically standardized population. The only problem is that last week (somewhere) I read a study that claimed that genetically standardized microorganisms in a standardized environment would have a random distribution of variations.
Now clearly we can't really *know* that what we think of as a "standardized environment" is perceived as such by the microorganisms, but it seems to me just as likely that there are quantum effects involved in ion-gate transmission decisions. Such random histories would amplify over time.
This would seem to imply that it's inherently impossible to assign causal effects for some macro-level decisions. Other times it's just ignorance. And we don't have decent grounds for deciding how much of the variation to assign to which "cause". And, of course, the distributions would not be separate.
So we end up with three causes, minimum. Genetic effects (including epigenetic), environmental, and random. And no pure states of any of them.
FWIW, I expect every "standardized strain" of lab rats to have had a lot of selection for things like "living well in cages" and "not biting the experimenters" and "not being terrified when picked up by a huge carnivorous animal", and probably lots of other things I haven't thought of. So I'm not sure how well their responses would map to those of a wild population. (That said, people aren't exactly a wild population, but the selection pressures have been different.)
To me this implies that one should be hesitant in considering that effects seen in an experiment on rats map well onto one involving humans. And hesitant in rejecting that consideration. (E.g. I've heard at least one claim that humans have a tendency to become more addicted to reward stimuli than do rats, but I've never been sure whether that claim was a joke.)
This tracks with my own experiences back when I was a daily cannabis user. I could happily go days or weeks without so much of a craving if I happened to be traveling or busy with some particularly engaging project at work or excited about a new romantic opportunity, but when I was having a slow week or feeling kind of down about myself, the idea of going 24 hours without hitting my vape filled me with dread and anxiety. Even the physical withdrawal symptoms like night sweats and insomnia depended heavily on my mental state and environment. At least in my limited experience with a single drug, the drug was functioning mostly as a distraction for things in my life I wasn't happy about and didn't want to deal with. The less I felt the need to distract myself, the less addicting the drug was, and vice versa.
One of the things I treasure most about the comments here is the constant reinforcement that people are really different from each other. I have never before heard of anyone having night sweats and insomnia as physical withdrawal symptoms from cannabis.
I do, first hand report from a very close one (long time low intensity, recreational user) so it's not a one point data ;-). And he got it not because of stopping but because accidental change of product (probably tbd-only instead of thc+tbd), so it's quite certainly pharmological, not nocebo.
> Which begs the question: what do meaningful experiences (however you want to define them) posses that make us prefer them over a snortful of heroin?
Nothing, in my case. Heroin is clearly superior to anything else I've ever experienced, and the only reason I quit is because I was becoming unable to get more heroin without significant damage to my ability to live (and therefore in the future acquire more heroin).
But I have an unusually strong preference for opioids, it seems.
In my experience, a key part of many addictions is avoiding difficult emotional situations. Something that fully absords or distracts you - "one facet becomes much stronger than everything else" - means you get a break from having to worry about other things that you don't have the emotional energy to deal with.
I try to build the habit of realising that I'm only doing something because it is distractively absorbing (in my case, pointlessly doomscrolling the news), and instead trying to make myself stop and journal about whatever is happening deeper in me emotionally that I'm trying to hide from.
In terms of the model above, it isn't just one thing becoming stronger, it is also other things that are painful becoming weaker that matters. The addiction can be ultimately dissastifying to the reward centres, but if it sucks up attention and hides the painful things, that is a short term reward in itself.
I've seen this in myself and others with alcohol, eating disorders, work. In moderation it isn't always bad - the relief from the emotional pain is a genuine relief. Addictions like (predictable, successful) work or (well made) video games can have the virtue that they make you feel like you have agency and productivity, so have less destructive side effects on self image and depressive thought patterns.
This maps well on to my own experience. It also leads into a clear feedback loop that can spiral out of control and ruin your life. Addictive behaviour suppresses emotional pain but causes longer term problems. This causes more emotional pain which makes the addictive behaviour more tempting.
Not a scientist, so take the ensuing thoughts with a pinch of salt but...
Is there an evolutionary angle to the phenomena you're describing?
If only the first few bites of food are tasty and then it's simply shovelling nutrients down your gullet, this makes sense from an evolutionary/survival POV: in a primitive scenario (mankind's lot for 99.9% of our existence) the purpose of the yummy taste is to get us to invest in the food source and keep going (the bait); then our body just wants us to mindlessly shovel down as much protein, carbs, whatever as we possibly can to improve our chances of survival.
So what about the "addiction" element in, for example, watching a movie or playing a video game? Well, let's return again to our (normal for most of human history) hunter-gatherer existence: in this state, activities in which we are investing a great deal of concentration and effort will have been geared towards surviving and/or passing on our genes.
Such relatively long term tasks might include working to extract food from difficult-to-access sources (individual nuts on a tree that each have to be picked, shelled with some difficulty before eating; grubs or insects extracted with a twig from inside the myriad crevices of a rotten log and so on). If you're engaged in such a task and are interrupted (forced to stop) it is upsetting because it's an interruption in meeting your basic survival needs.
Another example: hunters in primitive societies often rely on an exhaustive, meticulously observed scrutiny of their environment to (a) locate game and (b) catch it. This may entail staying in the same spot for many hours, barely moving, just observing, taking note of every movement in the grass or sudden flight of a bird. If your buddy strolls up mid way through this process and says "Hey! What's up?" all that good work of concentration is ruined and your chances of securing your calories for the day are diminished.
So when you get pissed because someone paused the movie, what you're really saying is: "You have just ruined my hunt and reduced my chances of survival!"
It's kinda weird to say that one is skeptical of a definition. Sure, that's a definition. There is a thing you can talk about: hijacking of your reward system by an externally administered chemical. Yes, you can get picky about trying to precisely define it so that food, oxygen etc.. don't count but at least relative to this society/environment we understand what counts.
Sure, that definition doesn't capture all things that are like addiction in terms of psychological behavior or neurology but it does capture an important/useful concept that's worth talking about so I don't think it can be dismissed as a bad or wrong definition. Chemical addictions have certain shared features (at least they do in our society...with different medical treatment/supervised usage who knows) and while you can counterexample almost any one feature that was claimed to be unique to chemical addictions it's still a useful concept for describing the world.
Sorry, I know that I'm being a bit pedantic and that you weren't denying that you could talk about the concept of external chemical addiction. However, I do think it raises the question of just what it was that you are claiming. Is the claim merely that, when you chunk the world up into concepts the way you find most salient or interesting that you'd not divide out the external chemical in this way? Or are you making a stronger claim about the neurological basis and how would we test it? I mean, of course, we all know that desires resemble addictions in some ways, but is there something more testable here?
This reminds me of the method I successfully used to quit both smoking and drinking. It came from Allen Carr's Easyway series. The books will not win any literary prizes but they were effective (at least for me, anyway, I know others who didn't have as much success).
He starts by asking the reader not to try quitting until they've finished the book and then repetitively drives home throughout the book that the pleasures derived from these addictions are illusury.
At the end he asks the reader then to mindfully (not the word he uses though) experience their last cigarette or drink. I remember feeling within my bones when I had my last smoke that it tasted horrible and gave me no pleasure whatsoever. Lo and behold, my nicotine craving was gone and I was from that day forward a non-smoker. So yes, I'm also sceptical about the chemical basis for addiction.
I repeated the process for alcohol, except that I wanted to cut down not quit. The book was cunningly called "The Easyway to control alcohol" so I thought it would help with this goal. It had the unexpected side-effect that I no longer felt the need to drink and so was a non-drinker when I finished that one and I have been ever since (9 years and counting)
Sounds exactly like my accidental last game of League of Legends. Most rounds I played were quite enjoyable, but I had one round where we were winning but my team couldn't close out the win for an hour and 20 minutes or so. We almost lost multiple times and it should have been thrilling, but I became very aware of how I felt through the entire game, casually mentioned mid game with the one person I was on voice with that this would be the last game I played and then afterwards haven't felt like picking it up again for many years. In spite of me sometimes intellectually wanting to pick it up, I might launch the game and log in, but never bring myself to hitting play.
Similar here. Played semi-competitively for about 7 years, then one day decided to actually pay attention to how the game made me feel. The overwhelming feeling was anger and frustration, so I uninstalled.
Quick math puts me at about 5500 hours spent playing, which would have been enough time to learn a language, learn python, get chartered, and be a better friend and son.
Oh, I didn't have the same feeling normally. Sure there were frustrations, but similar to any sport or challenge I put myself to. It probably helped that I always modeled the other players positively in my thoughts (I started playing back before all-chat was auto-muted, and I'm still friends to this day with people I met laning AGAINST me). Plus I don't have any illusion that I wouldn't have spent that time playing a different game. While I was playing League I pretty much didn't play any other video game. After I stopped I play some video games but typically board games fill the same slot.
I was talking to another friend who used to play piano quite well, and he said he went through a similar thing, while he generally found it rewarding one day while practicing he became particularly self-aware and afterwards he said it felt "hollow" and now have a slight involuntary revulsion when thinking about sitting down to play. Not enough that he doesn't enjoy listening to other people play, but the thought of playing himself feels slightly alien to him (his words).
The mechanism is interesting in that it seems similar when applied to a variety of subjects (smoking, gaming, playing music).
I had a very similar experience with quitting smoking, including the 'knowing in my bones that I was a non-smoker before I finished the book'. The same technique didn't work for alcohol for me - it needed three in-patient stints in rehab for that, but for smoking I'd heartily recommend Allen Carr's books. I happen to think he was a bit of a knob, but that didn't prevent his method working for me.
I draw the opposite conclusion that you do. Since a lot of the psychological manifestations of "addiction" is just normal motivational dynamics, the part in classical addictions that really deviates is the fact that they involve chemicals that bypass your Cartesian boundary to directly mess with your reward system. So the term "addiction" should be restricted to that, and other terms like "superstimuli" are more relevant when talking highly motivating but boundary-respecting factors.
I am not sure I understand this comment. What is the actual difference in the underlying views represented by saying someone is addicted to video games vs. video games are a superstimulus?
In my view, your body has evolved to maintain a certain I/O relation. You observe things with your senses, obtain nutrients through your mouth, and take action through your muscles.
You then have certain desires, which you seek out based on that I/O relation. A superstitious is something that appeals much more strongly to those desires than would be expected in the environment you evolved for, and can therefore lead to strange unbalanced stuff; but it still works through your standard I/O relation and appeals to your endogenous desires.
The desires are implemented in your brain in some complicated way, where you use your senses to predict achievement of your desires, which is then used to send out reward signals and such. Meanwhile, a chemical addiction bypasses this normal I/O relationship, and the endogenous generation of reward, to instead directly interfere with your reward signal.
Thanks, that helps. What is the significance of the difference between direct and indirect reward signal interference? Is it that behavior in the second case is more pathological from the perspective of beliefs/desires folk psychology? Is the payoff of making this distinction somehow related to the decades long Caplan/Alexander addiction debate?
I think it may help to consider what generalizations of the concept of "violating the I/O boundary" looks like. The simplest other instances of it would be stuff that gives you brain damage, e.g. lobotomy or sufficiently extreme blunt head trauma. These are cases where the skulls was supposed to protect your brain matter but failed to do so. They are fairly crude, though; a more advanced example would be something like rabies, which has evolved to spread via bites, which are caused by the mental insanity generated by the virus.
In my view, there's a natural category containing all of these and more; {chemical addictions, physical brain damage, brain germ infections}, where your behavior changes in ways not mediated by the natural I/O relation ("Cartesian boundary"), but instead via something that somehow bypasses it.
In a sense, it's closer to being "objectively pathological" - though labelling something as pathological is always a value judgement. The point is just that there's a non-value-judgement way that these things differ from normal psychological dynamics, which doesn't hold for "behavioral addictions". That doesn't necessarily mean that it would be more/less harmful, though there's probably a correlation.
And yeah, it could be said to be related to the Caplan/Alexander debate, though it doesn't take a definite stance on it.
Please watch this podcast https://youtu.be/QmOF0crdyRU by Stanford neuro biologist Andrew Huberman. As best as I can understand, There is no separate 'chemical addiction' pathway.
My point isn't about the parts of the pathway that chemical addiction uses, it's about the parts that it _doesn't_ use. Chemical addiction doesn't rely on your brain carefully assigning the stimulus a positive valence, instead it bypasses the brain's evaluation mechanisms to directly push the inner valence assignment buttons. Of course for "behaviorally addictive" stimuli, these same valence buttons also get used, but here they get activated by endogenous processes in the brain, making them less like chemical addictions and more like ego-dystonic preferences.
In section II, he talks about an AI metaphorically learning to "reach into its skull and increase the reward counter." If, say, a chess AI learns to do that, we can expect it to lose all motivation to play chess, and instead focus monomaniacally on increasing the reward counter directly, with probable destructive results.
That's basically what drugs do for people who become addicted to them: directly hack the brain's reward system. A drug addict has learned they can chemically stimulate/emulate a reward response on command. The brain has no real defense against this; the only upper limit to the intensity of a chemically-emulated reward response is the toxicity of the chemical. So the addict loses interest in all the things the system was designed to reward and focuses monomaniacally on using more drugs, with destructive results.
A superstimulus, on the other hand, *is* one of the things the system evolved to reward, just in a more intense or easier-to-obtain form. So in principle, the system is still working as intended, with the normal upper limits for reward intensity and the normal homeostatic mechanisms for balancing priorities; it's just skewed in favor of the superstimulus.
So you don't see e.g. food addicts abandoning their families in large numbers to live on the streets as they pour all their resources into obtaining and consuming more Skittles by any means necessary. You do see some clear distortion of priorities, sometimes severe, but not the wholesale hijacking that you do with drugs.
(One exception is Parkinson's patients treated with levodopa, who can develop some extreme behavioral addictions - typically gambling - probably because the medication increases the maximum reward intensity.)
For things operating within normal motivation dynamics, your reward system is rate limited by whatever you body can normally produce.
Adding chemicals that interact with the underlying circuitry directly leads to some similar behaviors with very different kinds of treatments.
You can be pretty easily. Behaviorally therapized out of most behavioral addictions. It in principle can be done with chemical addiction but wow is it a lot less successful, and only works by typically forever swearing off the involved thing. (whereas the proper behavior modification to a video game addiction is to only play video games a reasonable amount.)
And I think you are really mischaracterizing withdrawal by calling the suffering from an unfilled desire withdrawal, even with the "micro" hedge. Withdrawal is more like being sick. Just like I don't think it would make sense to call it a "micro depression" when your favorite character in a TV show dies and you feel sad.
I say that this is about ease of intervention, or that it necessarily correlates that much with it. There are plenty of endogenous behaviors that are really hard to change because evolution has optimized you hard to satisfy them.
You should watch/listen to Andrew Huberman's podcast on dopamine( https://youtu.be/QmOF0crdyRU ), which, IMO, explains what you're talking about quite well. To elaborate - he discusses how ALL motivation and addiction works in the same way at the biological level - via dopamine.
I feel like this is the what meditators mean when they talk about cravings. The tendency you set out is why life can feel unsatisfactory, but training your mind not to react so strongly is the way to come to terms with it.
There's also a biochemical angle in which some addictive chemicals have withdrawal symptoms (usually due to prolonged exposure causing receptor downregulation). I don't think this exists for things like video games.
I reached a similar conclusion (everything can be addicted) after listening to this "dopamine masterclass" podcast episode from Andrew Huberman at stanford:
Although I don't get that 'angry when stopping' business (my daughter sure does...), what this podcast described was a mechanism where things that make you feel good in the short term lower your baseline rate of dopamine (tonic release) for some period of time afterwards. This suggests that anything which releases dopamine can be "addictive" in the sense that you'll feel a craving for more, and have a 'come down' afterwards.
This lined up with my own experience where sometimes if i was in an extra stressful situation (i.e. my house is filled with cousins who've come to visit, and is therefore chaos), i would binge on carbs and also look at the news more often, the end result being i would feel like absolute shit after a few days. Each time i had the carbs or the news, i did feel better in the _short_ run, but in the long run i just felt worse.
This is exactly what it was like being addicted to, and then coming out of the addiction to cannabis, except the intensity and duration was lower.
Mhm the flow state thing is very interesting to me. Probably why surfers stay in the water all day, at least that’s why I have when I’ve gone a few times. Probably the same with other types of flow state based activities like snowboarding, skiing etc.
This doesn't explain the whole phenomenon though. When I'm eating a huge bag of chips that (even) I cannot finish in one sitting, I will suddenly feel a repulsion towards the bag when I'm full. There was no tapering off. I was stuffing my mouth with chips, and suddenly I feel revulsion towards it. Can this be explained by the theory of feeding my addiction just to feel normal?
Most surprising of your posts, yet. This one sounded like "pretty obvious stuff everyone kinda knows to be more or less true." Video games addictive: hell, yes. I remember cycling through the Eurasian steppe and then feeling a strong urge to play. - Not as in “not what I want”, but: "that is a want I would rather not feel now, but sure: "I want it"". But then I also used to feel "I want sex", when I 'd better focused on another topic. ;) - Movies/stories: maybe a somewhat different neuro-mechanic, but eagerness for the next episode of GoT, BB or Charles Dickens sequel + hate to be interrupted: yep. You are just surprisingly(?) normal here. Welcome to the monkey house!
Always nice to read an SSC-post again :) That one was simple/plain too, indeed. Maybe better links? -Anyways, the new post has a lively comment section. Me not negative, I am very fine with XKCD at times doing a joke at smbc -level, at least I get it then.
The appeal of the chemical model of addiction is that it provides a clear boundary around what is and isn't addiction. The microaddiction model seems like it risks collapsing into "anything that stimulates your reward center is addictive". If not everything is addictive then what's the principle that allows us to declare some things nonaddictive, and if everything is addictive then haven't you just redefined the word into a synonym for "enjoyable"?
This goes back to the concept of bimodal vs. unimodal distributions. It's useful to know whether we're dealing with 'everything enjoyable is addictive, and it just ranges from less to more addictive; 'addictive' things are those past a certain threshold' and 'addictiveness is a property which is significantly orthogonal to 'enjoyable', and we can objectively distinguish addictive and non-addictive things (at least in their central cases.)'
An interesting thing here is that addictive behavior towards food exists on a spectrum that includes binge eating disorder (BED) at the high end. I'm not an expect on this subject, but BED bears some resemblance to more traditional addictions in that it involves the feeling of a loss of control and the feeling that the addictive behavior is negatively impacting one's life. On the flip side, addictive behavior toward non-food stimuli like social media and video games also falls on a spectrum. There are lots of ways to arrange this spectrum, but I think ADHD seems like it could be described as one extreme, in that it often involves being unable to avoid stimuli to the point of seriously negatively impacting one's life. And guess what, the same drug, Vyvanse, is approved to treat both ADHD and binge eating disorder!
"Are flow states just another word for microaddictions?"
I don't think this is quite correct. Can we reformulate as: "Are the rewards of specific flow states the same as the rewards that lead us to microaddictions?" If so, I think the answer is that there are common chemical elements, but the contexts in which we experience them are qualitatively different (although it's not a binary contrast, and you can create borderline dilemmas).
The psychologist who coined the term flow, Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi, discussed resemblances between flow state ideals (performative artistry, sports achievement, etc.) and "addictions" (e.g., to gambling, sex) in work he published in the mid-'70s, long before his book "Flow." (Now video games are standard vehicles for measuring flow states in the lab.) An essential feature of Csikszentmilhayi's notion of "flow" is that the rewarding state involves the deployment of mastered skills (generally physical, but potentially intellectual). It has to do with "being in the groove" while doing something for a pre-imagined end. The association between the goal, the exercise of skill above a triggering threshold of complexity and duration, and the chemical experience is intrinsic to the meaning of the term "flow." At the end of the flow state, when a temporarily diminished or lost sense of reflective self returns, part of the experience is the residue of achievement that remains--the well executed ski run, expressive piano performance, quickly composed poem, and so forth. Those features can be distinguished, both through context and residual physical and psychological states, from the experiences and aftermaths of what actors themselves may be willing to name as "compulsive" gambling, sex, etc, which possess identifiers of what we mean by "addiction." The distinctions are as significant as the common features. Flow activities can become compulsive or obsessive, but they don't have to and very frequently don't. The essential element of the flow state is the experience of apparent autonomy of holistic skill operation, with minimal involvement of reflective intervention or sense of self-awareness.
I don't think that drugs are incompatible with flow experiences. Certain drugs might enhance performance, or psychedelics taken with "mystical" goals that are sought in the midst of an altered state might have goal/result structures similar to flow. But basically passive engagement that does not have a challenge/skill dynamic doesn't fit the definition of flow. (Some flow activities, like advanced Zen meditation, may appear passive, but require active discipline and skill engagement.) I think video games and card games are good borderline examples, hard to sort into or out of the "flow" category and probably falling to both sides of the line in specific cases. But I think potato chip eating, movie watching [I can think of exceptions], and the great majority of everyday drug experiences lack the context that turns dopamine into "flow."
I agree that drugs are compatible with flow experiences - a good example is playing music. Indeed, musical performers using drugs is a stereotype. I'm somewhat sceptical whether they actually enhance performance.
Flow involves inhibition of the brain's executive function (the neocortex activity that includes conscious reflection) and more autonomous expression of learned behaviors activated through other brain areas, which is why the state is called "autotelic." If you've invested well in consciously directed training of the body (e.g., well-formed finger action in playing an instrument), perfect execution is enabled by withdrawing conscious direction in performance. (Thinking about your finger action will muck up your music.) The reflective work of the cortex is reduced towards minimal monitoring/correction (we consciously steer the wheel as we drive only when we notice slight drifts from lane center)--the performer is free to focus on the music and audience (the road, rather than the steering wheel). It makes sense that some drugs could help suppress counterproductive cortical interference, helping performance, but also that the same drugs could make the reflective mind slow to re-engage when performance strays off course. (The music performed matters too: a stoned Myles Davis could stray far without course correction successfully; Yo-yo Ma cannot.)
I agree. I would call the experience of watching a great movie "absorption," or "imaginative Involvement,"not "flow". Flow involves skillful performance.
So, you're applying the concept of the hedonic treadmill to small-scale experiences alongside the observation that people don't like to stop doing things they enjoy?
Question: Are there people denying that gambling addictions are "real" addictions?
Maybe this is actually a significant argument in psychiatry, but as a layman, I've never encountered this "purely chemical definition" of addiction.
Let me talk about smoking for a moment, though. I used to smoke. I'd still prefer to smoke than not smoke, holding all other preferences aside, but I do have other preferences, so I don't smoke. It's been years since I've smoked, at this point; any chemical concept of addiction simply doesn't apply.
Smoking is just pleasant. Nicotine is, basically, my favorite drug, and I've experimented with many of them over the years. This is how I feel now, and it was, exactly and entirely, why stopping smoking was difficult.
Is that addiction? That's basically just saying that a preference is equivalent to addiction.
Now, there's a stronger case to be made for, say, coffee, which has unpleasant withdrawal effects. I am physically addicted to coffee. But also I routinely quit drinking coffee, deal with the withdrawal, and then later go back to drinking coffee; I'll even deliberately do this for a tolerance break a couple of times a year. As with nicotine, I like caffeine, and over the years I've grown to like the taste of coffee, as well. But the thing I could point at with coffee, the physical symptoms of withdrawal, basically make no difference to my behavior; if we call that addiction, well, that's distinct from preference as addiction, but also it fails to capture the behaviors society regards as problematic with regard to addiction.
This is part of the never-ending DSM wars. The DSM currently defines substance abuse disorders (related to the use of drugs) and gambling disorder (which was controversial but is now in there and very similar to the substance abuse ones) but no other so-called "behavioral disorders."
Psychiatric researchers have a tough job because they are both trying to answer a fact question: "are the forces that cause chemical dependency and the forces that cause behavior dependency similar enough to be considered the same force" *and* trying to provide their practitioners with tools to help their patients.
That's how you get bad ideas like "adjustment disorder" making their way into published literature and not being questioned particularly hard. Adjustment disorder is basically just "still being depressed or anxious after a major life event after six months." So if your husband of 40 years died a year ago and you're still depressed about it, you have adjustment disorder. That's insane. But...if they call it a disorder it gives practitioners a code they can put down on a sheet of paper to justify the expense of potentially necessary therapy to an insurer.
Probably the reluctance to classify clearly addictive behavior as addiction is more complicated than that, and likely political. Essentially, they're concerned that if they are perceived as pathologizing character flaws, they will struggle to get society as a whole to take the idea of addiction seriously. They have a vested interest in the decriminalization of drug possession, and are now making good progress on that. If they start saying "also playing video games is addiction, and eating badly is addiction, and etc." then the personal responsibility people will use that as argument that nobody wants anyone to be responsible for their own actions, and more people will be convinced by that.
In modern politics/culture wars, nobody can be seen to be admitting weakness, so it's unacceptable to say, "Well addiction really exists on a continuum, and even most people who use drugs in harmful ways can't be said to be addicted. Meanwhile you can be addicted to things that aren't drugs, because the mechanism for addiction is multifaceted. The question is whether the person genuinely cannot control the behavior, which is a matter of individual judgement." Instead you need a bright line, and any data that blurs that line will be ignored or attacked.
Adjustment disorder is a funny diagnosis because it's perhaps the most commonly used one in outpatient psychotherapy to address what happens when someone gets hit by a life change that's something short of life-threatening but they're having trouble coping with it -- divorce, job loss, relocation, etc. It's only supposed to be diagnosed when it's within three months of the stressful life event and if the symptoms persist six months after the stressor is resolved, the diagnosis should be changed to something else (anxiety, depression, etc). If your husband died 40 years ago and you're depressed now, adjustment disorder is definitely not the proper diagnosis. If your husband moved out two months ago and you're having trouble going to work or getting out of bed, that may be adjustment disorder.
I don't love the DSM and am not a huge believer in its categories, but sometimes it makes for interesting reading. Most of the substance use disorder diagnoses have criteria that speak more to the behaviors around the substance use, rather than to volume or frequency of use or chemical dependency per se. Has the person wanted to stop and tried but been unable to? Is their use of the substance interfering with work, school, parenting, or other valued arenas of functioning? Is the person getting in trouble with the law around their habit? Are they spending huge amounts of time planning to and acquiring said substance? Is all of this causing them distress?
Oh yes, I read it wrong! My point still stands but it's splitting hairs now. You're not supposed to diagnose adjustment disorder for an event that happened more than three months prior and you're not supposed to maintain the diagnosis for longer than six months after the event. But many clinicians don't observe those diagnostic requirements and diagnose it whenever someone seems to be suffering from a fairly recent stressor that's significantly impairing mood and functioning but symptoms don't qualify for PTSD. A diagnosis of adjustment disorder is often converted to one for depression or anxiety if the symptoms don't resolve in few months. At any rate, it's not clear to me why adjustment disorder is a bad idea?
It's not a bad idea, exactly. I'm not a huge fan of pathologizing what appears to me to be a normal grieving process + normal human variability. I think in the system we have, it's completely reasonable to have a diagnostic label to get people help when they need it. But it's yet another way in which psychology ( or capitalism/industrial society/community-less, godless heathens, depending on your persuasion) starts from the assumption that there is a normal way to be a human being and that every deviation from that is somehow a deviation from the ideal.
I agree with you 1000% on that. I'm a therapist working my way out from under the diagnosing frame after doing it that way for a long time in order to maximize people's access to care. I can't do it that way anymore.
And yet, I know a lot of therapists who work mainly with people in their teens and 20s who find that people in that age range who are having to get through high school and college and are so subject to intense "normifying" pressure, appreciate having diagnoses like ADHD or ASD or social anxiety, etc because it gives them a path to more self-acceptance and/or a little breathing room inside the strict and insane requirements of institutions. I myself feel pretty ambivalent about that but not for me to say for other people what's helpful.
As another example of what I'm talking about: I clearly have ADHD according to the DSM. I've been diagnosed and I take stimulant medication for it. The medication is helpful, and with the help of medication and therapy I have been able to change my career to something better suited to the way my mind works. My life is approximately one infinity times better than it would have been without the diagnosis. I would never ever wish that ADHD was not a diagnosable condition, because without it, it's possible that extreme anxiety and depression resulting from career instability and poor sleep hygiene would have actually led to my death.
By some estimates 10% of the population has ADHD. If 10% of your population has a mental disorder, it's not a mental disorder it's just a way people are sometimes. The only context in which I and 10% of my fellow human beings are "disordered" is one in which the only reasonable way to support oneself is to make oneself available to an employer from 8-6 every day, working at a steady, even pace on tasks as they are assigned. There's no reason that should be the only work paradigm. There's no reason for society not to have room for people who occasionally work 30 hours straight on a project they're excited about and then sleep for two days. That's an obvious value add. But because we assume there is a "correct" way to be human, that is a "disordered" way of life.
Potentially, small doses of stimulants for us would be good in any context. But because stimulant use is so tightly controlled, the only way to receive stimulant medication is through rigid diagnostics. Likewise, work accommodations for a person who is powerfully motivated and enthusiastic, but not entirely reliable, should not be medicalized. That's just a normal thing an employer should do to get the most value out of their employees!
Tl;dr: We have created a system in which every person has to be treated as a square peg, and then we provide psychiatric tools to make round pegs more square - that's not a problem with psychiatry, exactly. But society does have round holes, and we'd all be better off if we just let round pegs go in those.
Any thoughts on how this applies to those with Binge Eating Disorder? The most common thing I hear from my BED patients is their inability to stop eating once they've taken a bite of a problem food. If they're in public, though, they're usually able to moderate the amount of chips, chocolate, candies, etc. they're eating.
Maybe I just have low willpower (and an ADHD diagnosis, but it's hard to tell how much that actually means anything given the hand-wavey requirements for such a diagnosis) but there are just so many times that I am doing a stimulating activity and cannot stop despite most of my higher faculties telling me to do so. That may not be "addiction." It seems useful to distinguish between this and the more destructive forces of drugs that will literally kill you if you stop taking them. But if not I don't know that we have a good word for what it is.
And while it may not be the same force that can kill a heroin user or heavy alcohol drinker if they try to stop cold turkey, I suspect it's the same force that causes people to spend their whole lives smoking pot.
This sort of speculation is obviously analogical, but for me it hits the sweet spot between being empirically grounded (but obvious or detail-laden) and being a diverting flight of fancy (verging on the purely subjective). The low epistemic status you assign it is actually for me a symptom of what is most appealing - but this is coupled with its being extremely plausible and coherent.
My only complaint is that it cut off way too soon. Totally broke my flow.
Slightly unrelated, but I’m curious whether taking naloxone is unpleasant for people who aren’t regular opiate users.
I was watching a YouTube video where the person allegedly got addicted to sun exposure (apparently it triggers some endogenous opiate receptors), took naloxone, and experienced opiate withdrawal symptoms. But he didn’t try the naloxone before the sunbathing stint (at least not on video), and also didn’t control for a placebo effect.
FWIW I know of only one case of a non-opioid-user taking naloxone (in an actually effective way — oral is almost pointless), and yes, they hated it. But that's an N of 1.
What if "addiction" and "focus" are two sides of the same coin? When I'm really productive in my home office, and the kids barge in complaining that one of the others was looking at them wrong, I get frustrated. I'm less frustrated if I was between activities. I'm more frustrated if I've tried multiple times to start an activity, but keep getting interrupted.
If you're focusing on a story (reading, watching, or listening) and you're suddenly interrupted, the problem isn't one of 'flow' but of focus. If your current activity requires you to put multiple things together at the same time, you need to focus or you'll lose the thread and have to start all over again.
I'm not sure how to connect this to potato chips, but it fits the experience with video games and TV shows. It's possible the same system that's responsible for rewarding you for being focused writing an important email is rewarding you for being focused playing a video game or understanding a complex plot. Indeed, many apps that market themselves as 'zen games' are designed to allow you to put them down at any point without losing focus/flow.
Breaking with consensus, I think this is straying a bit far into the trap of "Let's pathologize literally every aspect of the human experience" that psychiatrists of both the professional and armchair varieties tend to stumble into.
Yeah, taste-bud burnout can happen. I honestly assumed everyone noticed this and I've never had a real issue with it. But it's certainly not a universal or certain event, and I wouldn't describe it as a very small addiction. And then extending this beyond food to watching TV or film (and inviting logical extension to literally anything that makes people happy) strays into the bizarre.
It's an interesting thought, but I think its low epistemic confidence is deserved; a bit too much of a shower thought.
This doesn't match my experience at all, but it is possible this has to do with the nature of the food I'm eating versus what you are. I work from home, so cook all of my own food from raw ingredients, even making my own tortillas, salsas, broth, everything short of slaughtering my own animals and milling my own grain. So nothing mass-produced where the company is trying to make it addictive and I don't add sugar to anything. But I absolutely do not develop a tolerance or tapering off of food goodness. The last bite is just as good as the first. Another possibility is food is eventually subject to diminishing marginal utility, but mostly when you're eating more than you need, and I'm not doing that.
Also, thanks to a history of spine injuries and surgery recovery, I've been on opioids for pretty long periods of time. Tolerance and addiction may be related in some way, but they are definitely not the same thing. I did find the first few doses euphoric and later doses not. Effectiveness at pain relief also decreased a bit eventually, though it isn't always easy to tell because pain usually decreases as you heal anyway. Nonetheless, in spite of both enjoying it and apparently developing some level of tolerance or adaptation to it, I never got addicted. I took Percocet quite regularly for over three years and had zero trouble stopping when I didn't need it any more.
In Sam Quinones’ book “The least of us” he discusses animal research showing that the ones that had been encouraged to be sugar-addicted had different - more addictive - responses to opiates.
Do you have workable definitions for awareness and mindfulness? At the beginning of the article you talk about being mindful of the presence or absence of pleasure when eating, but it's pretty clear that the same process would happen even if you weren't being mindful. But at the end you speculate that addiction is about being hyper-aware of one facet of being motivated. Clearly addiction can happen without mindfulness, so mindfulness must be different from awareness, as you define the words.
I started reading the article expecting mindfulness and awareness to basically be the same thing, and I agree about how the mindful eating works, so if we use my intuitive ideas about the meanings of the words awareness must not be required for addiction. As I write this I can't fill in the blanks -- I don't have definitions I like of awareness, mindfulness, or addiction.
1. Some foods/food additives work on neurotransmitters in a chemical way. My first question here was “which brand of potato chips?” because some have additives that do this. There may already be an ACX/SSC article on the evidence for or against high fructose corn syrup doing this to some people. For myself there are a few chemicals that hit like a ton of bricks and it’s unpleasant enough that I make effort to avoid them (I am somewhat sure it’s those, and further personal research is unpleasant enough to not be worth it.) Others find those pleasant though or at least habit-forming. Some of the dust-type flavors on some chip brands will do this (sour cream & onion Pringles is one, there are many others.)
2. Flow state - I think repetitive stationary activities open up a type of cognitive processing which doesn’t always happen in awareness consciously. When I get the most annoyed at being interrupted in a movie or game, it’s usually this other processing that hates being interrupted. Leaving the game itself isn’t so bad, but that other track takes a while to get going and doesn’t want to stop. Depending on other life circumstances, people who need this processing will get very protective of their methods. Something might look like a compulsion or addiction, but it’s more like “I have to claim I really need this, or they’ll never leave me alone long enough to finish my thoughts about other topic Z.”
“ Opioids can still stimulate your reward system more strongly than video games and potato chips can, but not for lack of trying by Activision and Frito-Lay Inc.”
Is that true? Millions of people try opioids every year, they can me fentanyl at my last colonoscopy as an example. And people have surgery, dental work, etc. But only a very small percentage become addicted.
Everyone eats food but only a small percentage end up 900 pounds. Food is obviously more complicated as quitting food cold Turkey is 100% fatal.
As there are all manner of recognized behavioral addictions (including food) I think you're headed in the right direction here. But, truth be told, depending how you look at brain function, it's all a chemical addiction. When you over stimulate your dopamine producing brain parts, by for instance binging on porn, you do cause the brain to produce additional receptors, so you need more and more to get the same result. Which means that when you aren't binging on it you can't produce enough dopamine to be happy. Same thing probably happens when you get interrupted in the middle of the "flow state". Your brain is expecting the next dopamine molecule to pop in and it doesn't. So you feel bad.
In a way, I wish this happened to me with food. It doesn't. I have to be truly satiated before I perceive tasty food as less tasty. Twenty bites doesn't even begin to cause that to happen. I'm having a mildly difficult time believing your experience can be real. I mean, I believe it, but it seems very odd. As a side note, I own more than 200 cookbooks.
I'm a writer. When I'm in writing in a flow state, I experience a distinctive, unpleasant physical sensation when someone interrupts me. If I've forgotten to mute my phone and it rings, well, I'm too old to throw a temper tantrum, but I certain indulge in a curt tone as I answer.
Is 'motivational hyper-awareness' that which is mediated by ΔFosB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSB)? From what I understand, ΔFosB is implicated in reward salience and just keeps building up with chronic exposure to addictive substances.
I'm interested to know if ΔFosB might be an under-considered target for anti-addition interventions, as well as if it plays a computationally interesting role in reinforcement learning. Curiously, the neurocorrelate/MoA-knowledgeable people I know don't often talk about this mechanism - is that because it is uninteresting, weirdly hard to pharmacologically target, or just that more basic reward system stuff gets all the attention?
"The reward system" is a useful phrase for identifying brain regions involved in reward. But introspectively, I seem to have many different reward percepts. I would think each different reward qualia ought to count as a different reward mechanism, because what seems to happen in a potato-chip eating frenzy is that one particular reward signal outcompetes others. I am sometimes conscious while eating potato chips that I'm no longer enjoying them and do not, in fact, want more of them; would even like to stop; yet my arm keeps on reaching into the bag and stuffing them into my mouth. It's a confusing brain state, and "reward system activated" seems an inadequate summary of it.
I'm pretty sure my own perception of this experience is not universal, because I've watched lots of videos recently about how to lose fat, in which the leanest, most-successful fat-losers--say, Jeff Cavaliere Athlean-X Dot Com (his full legal name)--say "Just stop eating junk food!" They've clearly never experienced a diet blackout, in which you wander through the house apparently (to your conscious mind) at random, and then end up in the kitchen, where your conscious awareness fades for a few seconds until you "wake up" and discover your arm has reached out, grabbed some food, and stuffed it into your mouth. I think these super-lean people just have a defective hunger system.
I'm perplexed as to why we respond so much more strongly and quickly to food deprivation than to water deprivation. Most of us could survive 3 days on our water reserves, and months on our fat reserves. So why is it harder to go a full day without eating than without drinking?
As to movies and stories, I think that's quite different. Stories are, contrary to Aristotle's *Poetics*, very cognitive. A traditional story arc has a complex grammar to it, which involves a fractal structure of reversals and new initiatives, callbacks to earlier foreshadowings, the closing-off at the end of issues raised near the beginning, and tying the plot in several places to a theme which parallels it. Classical music is very similar in structure. Rhetoric involves similar principles.
I'll consider 'addictions' to e.g. video games more than just metaphorical when you show me someone who emptied their bank account and is giving $5 blowjobs to get an Xbox or another bag of potato chips.
So you're implying that 100% of property crimes are committed by addicts? I think you'd have a hard time convincing anyone of that.
People commit crimes for all kinds of reasons. People steal to eat all the time. Are those people addicted to food?
Also, I'll go ahead and point out that 'commiting crimes' and 'giving $5 blowjobs' are very different things and imply vastly different motivational factors. That's why I picked that specific behavior. Anyone can steal. Only someone with their feet to the neurochemical fire engages in things like $5 bjs. And Xbox-wanters don't do that. That strikes me as dispositive w/r/t to the question of whether 'gaming addiction' is fundamentally similar to 'heroin addiction'.
The description of hyper-awareness of one facet of the motivation system is intriguing, but it seems to match various forms of arousal more than addiction per se. Addiction is usually defined in terms of a compulsive behavior. The example of "mindful eating" that the piece begins with doesn't sound much like an addiction, even a micro one, in that there was no compulsive element; it was just a weird effect of mindfulness applied to something we normally do unmindfully.
This is similar to the reinforcer pathology view of addiction, which involves an overconsumption of a reinforcer in the face of aversive consequences. (Reinforcer here in the behavioral sense). From this view, many things can be considered addictive beyond drugs, like food, sex, or video games.
From my own experience, becoming less pleasurable over time is not an inherent property of addictions. I have an actual physical addiction to caffeine (get a headache on a day I don't have it), but I still enjoy it as much as the first time I drank coffee. And when I eat junk food that I like, I feel like I enjoy it equally the whole time. (Sometimes I'll compulsively eat a snack I don't really like just because it's sweet or salty and in front of me, but that's different.)
Yep, the part about diminishing returns when eating is not relatable content for me. Even when distracted, I tend to savor every bite of something I'm lucky enough to find delicious.
I do not notice that tasty food becomes less tasty for me. I just tried this with French fries and ice cream, and they tasted good until I was full.
Additionally, heroin never stops feeling good, adjusted for tolerance. Even without increasing dose, it still feels good at first — just doesn't last as long as it used to.
If you are talking about things that you like, but are not actually addictive, then you are describing either adaptation or habitation, which are similar in outcome, but have different mechanisms. Basically, you don't feel as much of the effects of sensory stimulation the tenth time as the first time.
On the other hand, if you are dealing with things that are actually addictive, they have three properties: desire (you really enjoy it), withdrawal (you feel bad when you no longer can get it), and tolerance (you get less and less enjoyment with repeated experiences). The reason for withdrawal and tolerance is that the body does not like to be disturbed and if the drug (or whatever) disrupts its homeostasis, it produces a compensatory response that negates the drug (or whatever) effect. That's why addictive drugs have less and less of an effect as the body gets better snd better at negating their actions. Pavlov pointed out that the body does this by responding to the environmental cues that predict the onset of the drug. If the environmental cues that have predicted the drug are there, but the drug is not, you just get the negating effects that constitute the withdrawal symptoms, which are always the opposite of the drug effects.
Paul Grahams essay "The acceleration of addictiveness" is a great add on to the last sentence "...other ways are rapidly catching up". There's obviously plenty of people addicted to drugs, but in the 21st century we're starting to see more and more people "addicted" to other things (social media, video games, junk food, porn, etc). That trend is only increasing and is quite concerning.
I notice people talking about Youtube addiction, but nobody talking about the decrease in broadcast TV addiction.
Which is to say: To what extent are the new "addictions" actual increases in consumption, as opposed to trading off against a backdrop consumption level of a generalized passive entertainment?
(With maybe an asterisk on cell phones, which seem to at least some extent to be trading off against social activities, as opposed to passive entertainment)
That's a good point. I don't have explicit evidence to back this up, but it seems to me like people are using youtube (or just social media in general) more than they consumed tv in the past. I think we're essentially trading up in that way, where, yes, we stop using old mediums, but we use the new ones more because they are more addicting.
I was an RA in a lab working on the neurobiology of the mammalian reward/motivation system using medial forebrain bundle stimulation experiments as our model. This was two decades ago and the study of drug addiction was a major application of our work. My way of conceptualizing it was that "addiction" was undesired compulsive behavior that ultimately comes from that signaling pathway(s) and chemical substances that are addictive that work by either directly or indirectly creating axon potentials in the right areas. But all addictions are chemical at their root. Cocaine and gambling ultimately do similar things in brain when they become compulsive. The route is just slightly different.
One of my favorite party tricks is to walk up to the bowl of potato chips and announce to whoever is paying attention - "I just want one". Then I eat one potato chip and walk away.
Let's think of a person as a reinforcement learning agent with a particular reward function. Integrating a reward function over time with exponential time discount is mathematically equivalent to integrating the time derivative of the reward function with the same exponential time discount (up to constants). So, this can be just a mechanism to motivate the exact same behavior. The advantage of taking the derivate can be a better dynamic range (the derivative of the reward usually doesn't vary as much as the reward itself can vary). That is, it saves us the need to use more neurons to represent reward values.
You're absolutely right about food, I've noticed that exact phenomenon. I'm told things taste better to us when our bodies are more in need of the specific nutrients they contain; I noticed the truth of it in pregnancy (when I used to open the fridge and grab whatever appealed to me most, e.g. a spoonful of mustard, in order to stay ahead of cravings--that was a delicious spoonful of mustard, folks), and in a more muted way I notice it now. The first (little) handful of chocolate chips tastes amazing, further handfuls less so--so if I've had a good enough day to have the willpower, I stop after the first.
But movies are entirely different. A story is like sex: it has a climax, and the climax is the part people want, it feels good and it releases tension. The buildup to it makes it better; few people want it instantly b/c they know it won't be very good that way; but the climax is the part people want. The frustration of being interrupted is the frustration of not being able to complete the experience, not that of not being able to repeat or continue it.
Granted, I don't know how chemical addictions work, so I don't know what exactly the import of this distinction might be. But it certainly seems important to me.
That is a useful distinction. My intuition and personal experience tell me that addiction is much closer to the former.
It’s the constant itch you can’t scratch, I’ve never experienced it as an “incomplete experience.”
I have certainly experienced sex that way, but that’s never made me wake up and want to do it again.
…Well, that’s not true exactly, but it’s different. It’s not like that constant craving one experiences in addiction IME
part of it goes to the muff texture thing that was mentioned earlier. Addiction is a very narrow focus of attention on one specific desire and one who suffers from it is willing to endure a lot of seemingly miserable things in order to accomplish that, up to and including having their teeth filled with crumbs..
That description of heroin disagrees with my impression at least, as a multi-time recovered addict. I find that it is unpleasant the first time or two but once you get addicted it allows you this amazing ability instantly put your mind into exactly the state it is looking for. Outside of the physical addiction, it is that explicit control of state of mind which I think is most addicting to many people.
It was quite pleasant the very first time I tried it. I remember waking unusually early, feeling especially rested, climbing into the shower and thinking, (uh-oh) "What can I sell or steal to get some more of that?"
Recently I have watched a talk about addiction that complements this post. Talk is by Reinhold Bartl, head of the Milton Erickson Institute Innsbruck. He offers a hypno-systemic view on addiction as the loss of choice (der Verlust von Wahlmöglichkeiten). Addiction is a situation where a) someone enjoys a substance or an activity very much and b) is scathed for this by another person. Typically addiction is developed during adolescence where this conflict takes place between a kid and it's parent and is internalized in the further course of life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B73Kot6M3wU
Seems the criterion for 'enjoying' food is focussed on taste. Isn't there an opposing force that stops one from eating 20 potato chips or 10 squares of chocolate, namely the "mouthfeel"?. I hate the feeling of my mouth being full of the residual debris of foodstuffs, especially chocolate or chip-dust. The moment I feel that coating start to accumulate, I'm done, which is usually after 1 square of chocolate or a handful of chips.
Is there a relationship between disgust-sensitivity and binge-eating? Can't tell if highly disgust-sensitive people are inherently resistant to binge-eating because of the mouthfeel effect; or if - conversely - binge eating is a shame-response to disgust for sensitive people.
"Everyone always says you should “eat mindfully”. I tried this once and it was weird. For example, I noticed that only the first few bites of a tasty food actually tasted good. After that I habituated and lost it. Not only that, but there was a brief period when I finished eating the food which was below hedonic baseline."
I really can't imagine having this experience with food.
> Instead, I think of addiction as what happens when you become hyper-aware of one particular facet of your normal motivation system.
This is a (the?) standard definition of addiction in the literature, right? "Hypersensitization of incentive-salience attribution" is what I recall from, e.g., The Mind of an Addicted Brain: Neural Sensitization of Wanting versus Liking, by Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, in Current Directions in Psychological Science , Jun., 1995, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jun., 1995), pp. 71-76
Not only can tolerance develop over the course of multiple uses of the same drug, but it also develops rapidly within a single use of a drug in a process called "tachyphylaxis". How long does Adderall IR last, experientially? About 5 hours. What's its elimination half-life? About 10 hours. So 10 hours after the dose you're no longer feeling the effects (or you're experiencing a rebound / "come down") and yet you're still at 50% of the peak plasma levels! AFAICT this is true for a lot of psychoactive drugs (though sometimes this happens due to protein binding).
Another relevant concept is "substance use disorder", which I assumed meant something along the lines of "has a serious tolerance to illegal drugs" but in fact means an individual is persisting in their drug use despite serious negative consequences in other areas of their life. Similarly for addiction, which is often used colloquially to mean "experiences negative effects without" but actually means "compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences".
So if I'm drinking a fairly consistent amount of coffee every day and would have trouble living my normal life without it, I'm dependent but not addicted. Similarly one might argue that many of the early examples in this article are more akin to temporary dependences than temporary addictions.
But the article settles on the right conception of addiction, IMO. You're not addicted when it's hard to stop; heck, it's hard to change any habit. You're addicted when you start to sacrifice the rest of your life in pursuit of one source of pleasure.
I've encountered many addictive things in my life, and the strongest was World of Warcraft. It doesn't just hit the pleasure button in your brain (which drugs can certainly do _much_ more effectively). It gives you goals, it makes it easy to become part of a community, and to take on an important role in that community. It rewards your work with permanent incremental progress. I recall being frustrated not only with having to go to class, but also by normal social interactions - hanging out with friends - that were previously the highlight of my week. A few more hours and I could gain a level; what could friends offer me that would compare?
This certainly sounds like addiction / substance use disorder to me, though the DSM probably doesn't consider World of Warcraft to be a substance.
I'm a little bit surprised that this should be a new thing - especially with Scott's background as a trained and practicing clinical psychiatrist. My own model of addiction is like this since decades: you do something which feels nice, this produces dopamine and you want to do it again. And again. And again. No need for external chemicals playing with your brain, just nearly a billion years of evolution of life on earth. Some chemicals can speed up the addiction process because they emulate chemicals of our inner reward system. People call these chemicals literally 'dope'. But they call activities which do the same 'dope' as well. I just remember a lot of skiers and snowboarders wearing clothes from an brand called 'dope' these days and totally can understand this. I'm totally addicted to skiing recently, spending a lot of money on that, gave it higher priority then family and work the past months. Same with playing computer games (not me but a kid), reading all day (kids), Smartphones (the whole family) and so forth.
So I'm buffled that all this should be a new thing. Maybe I had learned a general truth by myself which ist not yet common wisdom? Can't believe that...
I was baffled as well. Any action or even thought has an effect on our hormone household to some degree, drugs being more direct and thought and action patterns more indirect. But I suppose it's worth making some concepts resurface, though, even if it's made to sound like it's a new insight. At any rate, it could be of benefit to anyone that hasn't made the connection yet or needed reminding of that connection. That's why the "speculative epistemic status" disclaimer is a nice touch, clever.
I feel like I'm missing something here. Why would you be bringing a huge bag of potato chips instead of just one portion of regular food?
After the kids stop ringing the doorbell on Halloween, I take the leftover candy out to the garage and put it in the trunk of the car my wife drives. She brings it to work the next day. I just can't sleep knowing there are still uneaten Snickers bars downstairs. :)
I suppose this means I should never try heroin.
> I don't agree that the 20th potato chip tastes significantly worse than the first (sure, above the threshold of noticeability), and the bit about being below the hedonic baseline after finishing is frankly bizarre.
Yeah, I've never experienced this either. Not that I've ever tried to pay attention to such an effect. But I ate a particularly delicious pork chop for lunch today, and the first bite was just as tasty as the last.
I tend to have a threshold where something over that reduces in tastiness. If I eat 5 skittles, they are all delicious. If I eat an entire family-sized bag, I definitely don’t enjoy the last ones as much.
That threshold is food specific, and as I’ve grown older and my general diet has shifted some, I’m less able to find a lot of super sweet stuff continuously enjoyable like I used to.
One thing that helps prolong the good flavors is variation. Alternating tuna fish sandwich and Pringles chips lets me eat much more with continual enjoyment then if I just eat Pringles by themselves.
I’m gonna go get some food now (but I could stop any time I wanted to).
I can’t speak for others, but my process is I start eating, and while there’s still food, I keep eating. If I pause to consider whether I’m hungry or enjoying it, I can easily stop eating in the middle, but it’s not the natural outcome.
Also for me it’s not just junk-food. Same thing happens with baby carrots, cashews, etc. This never struck me as particularly unusual, but maybe it’s just my culture (middle-class American). Learning to not waste food generally means learning you to decouple your hunger and enjoyment from the act of continuing to eat. Once it’s on your plate (or in your hand), it’s getting eaten. I’ve since changed my habits somewhat, but the default is still to just eat food when it’s there ready to eat.
Right, same for me. The first bite of some tasty food is as good as the last. And that yummy last bite may send me back for seconds.
For me, it depends. For sugary foods, I think there absolutely is some declining utility. The first handful of Skittles is great, the 12th can be almost revolting. By contrast, starchy foods or fatty foods, I can eat vast quantities of if my active brain is not monitoring the situation, and yes, I agree the 1st bite and the 15th are pretty similar in goodness. Perhaps this has something to do with differences in the way sugar, fat, and starch are metabolized?
I'll also add: I think it depends on how hungry I am, too. If I'm reeeeally hungry, those first few bites are very pleasing, and then there's a bit of a drop off to pretty good. By contrast, if I'm only moderately hungry, the entire meal is likely to only be moderately pleasing.
Ditto to all of this- I think that Scott's straying a bit too far into the realm of "every human behavior is some kind of pathology" here.
Same here. I feel great after a delicious meal, and I find it tasty until the end. I'm eating the last of a dessert right now and I'm trying to eat mindfully and... Yep, still delicious.
I have the same experience with food. I was interested to see if there would be more people out there who didn't experience it in at all the way Scott described above, and it's somewhat reassuring to find out that this was indeed the case.
Having established that there is a sub-set of the population that experiences food differently, could we find out if that sub-set also experiences addiction at different rates or in different ways? Could that be linked to some kind of chemistry or brain structure? Probably quite interesting to do...
One of the things I treasure most about the comments here is the constant reinforcement that people are really different from each other. "... guilt trip you get when you decide to get high way too early in the day?" I know of 2 people who, every day, smoked a fat one for breakfast. One ran a computer networking consulting company, the other was president of a large metropolitan hospital.
So, “all desire is suffering”, in an actual concrete way?
Works even better with the allegedly more accurate translations (I don't know Sanskrit or Pali) as "unsatisfactoriness" or similar. The claim that all desire (and life, for that matter) is suffering always struck me as a bit extreme, but saying it's all ultimately somewhat unsatisfying rings much more intuitively true to me.
It also jibes with what we would expect from the kind of motivational- and reward system resulting from blind evolution, as opposed to a superintelligence-level engineer who might code in actual goal states:
"Alright, you have done/accumulated/consumed enough of X to reach the optimal level Y, so you shall now be granted a feeling of perfect satisfaction regarding X until it drops below the minimum maintenance level (with safety margin) Z, at which point you shall again start to feel unsatisfied with the amount of X in your life.
That's far too fiddly and context-dependent for evolution (at least when it comes to the kind of vague, not immediately survival-determining things discussed here), so the system we got instey just goes:
"Good job, you've done/accumulated/consumed some X, that's great, have a pat on the back, well done you... but was it *enough* X?'
PS: I can't remember where I read it; I think it was some blog in the... let's call it rationality-adjacent spirituality sphere?
...anyway, the author put forth their personal "not in any way linguistically derived, but intuitive-feeling modern english"-"translation" of dukkha:
Basically "a (bit of a) bummer".
I personally found that very fitting.
Just try mentally substituting that whenever something is described as "dukkha", or "suffering" in a spiritual sense :)
That sounds like it could be Bob Wright, of "Why Buddhism is True".
I have that book on my shelf (or rather, in one of the stacks of books for lack of shelf space), but haven't yet read it (though I've listened to one or two interviews with the author about it).
I expect it to be the kind of book that doesn't give me loads of new insights, but a better understanding of, and foundation for, my own views, and likely in the form of much more well-constructed and refined arguments than I could spontaneously generate myself.
Because when asked about my beliefs on a lot of religious/spiritual/metaphysical topics, my answers usually boil down to "basically some form of Buddhism, without any of the parts that seem to be remnants of its cultural history*; but it's still very much a work in progress"
*eg deva realms and suchlike
**wait, that's roughly what's being referred to as "secular Buddhism", isn't it? I'm not in an English-speaking country
I'm coincidentally listening, at this very moment, to a recent Remnant podcast about happiness research and it really fits in here.
https://remnant.thedispatch.com/p/get-happy
And why wouldn't evolution set us up like that, given that it's only in the last few thousand years maybe that humans have been able to build up adequate reserves of wealth to not be at constant threat of running out by the end of next winter or next dry season. The places where this isn't true, tropical places with calm weather and plentiful easy food, seem to have produced people with a much more relaxed demeanor.
I have no actual statistical research, only anecdote and personal experience, but your intuition about this definitely matches my experience of the world, and in particular it is why I swore off online gaming after spending three months becoming increasingly obsessed with a text based MUD in college -- I realized that I was on a bad trajectory, quit, and decided henceforth I would only engage with forms of gaming that had some kind of end-point I could reach. With a truly excellent game, like Breath of the Wild, there is definitely a let-down when it's done, and also some reflection on "was spending all that time on that worth it?" It takes a month or two of returning to spending that spare time on other stuff to "balance out" and be able to really decide for sure whether I think the game was a worthy work of art -- as worth spending time on as reading a novel or watching a long narrative TV show -- or whether it was just a rabbit hole that kinda wasted several dozen hours of my life (and so I should maybe be more discriminating about what game I pick up next, listen to reviewers who were negative on that one, etc).
I will add here that with the online game, the combination of competitive and collaborative elements of the game were a big part of the problem. You wanted to help out your friends in the game, not let them down; and you wanted to compete for status. It's a kind of hijacking of normal human social drives. The grind of that made it all-consuming. You'd be doing anything else, and thinking, "but I could be earning internet points right now." It was not healthy behavior and it was already causing my grades and real-life social relationships to slip after just a few months... I also, anecdotally, know a couple of relationships that dissolved because one of the two people disappeared into EverQuest... Some of this behavior definitely meets the "causes problems in the rest of your life, and you don't change the behavior even though you acknowledge it's hurting you" aspect of how "addiction" gets defined.
I've had a number of similar experiences. My newer approach is to only do entertainment activities that I find fun, and only while I'm having fun with it. It's been weird to stop reading books halfway through or not finish video games (even ones with clear endings), but I find myself enjoying my free time much more that way. I used to push myself to finish a book that was not very good, or finish a video game just because, long after I stopped enjoying the actual play of it.
On what I think is a related note, I also try to eat more varied foods and can in fact each just one or a few chips. Last night I wanted a snack, and got three bites of three different flavors. I highly recommend that, over eating a bunch of one item. I had not thought about it before this post, but I'm pretty sure Scott's right that the enjoyment per bite fades the more you eat the same thing. Three delicious flavors as individual bites really maximizes the enjoyment of each, and you can save the rest for later.
Food Wars (anime) makes a comment that gourmet food is delicious on the first bite, sometimes overwhelmingly so, whereas diner food is meant to hit its peak after a few bites and develop a craving.
My experience with high quality snacks/desserts vs low cost ones tends to agree.
Hence why gourmet food often comes in a seven course meal of small plates while diner food is a huge plate of carbs and fat and protein.
Great ideas. I'm going to utilize these.
I’ve been using Blue Apron for a few years. Their consistently best genre of meal utilizes this principle. It’s some sort of grain bowl where you make four or five items (eg, boil some farro, mix some yogurt and lemon zest and olive oil into a sauce, quick pickle some onions in vinegar and sugar, while roasting a vegetable) and then mix them all up. Each bite has a different mix of these flavors, and they’re all somewhat distinctive flavors, so every bite is delicious until the end. The only problem is the number of dishes you have to wash at the end.
The thing is, I still at least _think_ I am enjoying a game, through to the end, because a well-designed game has that whole dopamine-hit structure of challenge and reward. It's very hard to objectively judge whether it was overall _good_ until you're out of that loop.
I definitely do the thing you're talking about with food, though. I think somebody else in the thread mentioned just getting multiple samples of ice cream rather than an entire scoop... I've been to some shops where you can get something like a single-scoop cup but with five tiny scoops.
A lot of games tend to morph over time into more complex games. There are more options to choose from, the difficulty of the game goes up, and the rewards become less frequent per time spent in the game. The alternative to slower rewards is very fast completion - which used to be quite common! Games from the 80s could sometimes be beat in 15 minutes, even if the typical playthrough would normally take a few hours (Contra, Mario 1). In more modern games, there is a tendency to want to give players the option to keep going. This makes sense and isn't weird, but it does mean that the "end game" content plays differently than the first half. I find that I enjoy the beginnings of games fairly well, and the middle of games quite well, but don't enjoy the ending phase. A lot of games do still have a "basic finish" victory where you do the main quests and defeat the final boss on the easiest difficulty. If I play a game like that, I will still usually finish it and enjoy the whole game. Games where there are numerous side quests throughout that have an important effect on the rest of the game (or the game feels very incomplete without it) tend to turn me off and I either don't play them or stop before reaching the end.
I also would say I definitely was having fun with the MUD -- I liked the folks I was playing with, I even went to a real-world meetup. The problem was just that I couldn't play it _a little_. Either I was going to play it obsessively for hours every night, or not at all.
I also played Ingress for a few years, with a strict rule for myself of not car-gressing for day-to-day play -- only bike, walk, trail hike, etc. Drive places only for organized operations. That way the addictive quality drove pro-social and healthy behavior. And I played it hardcore enough that I turned up in the New York Times when they profiled the game. When it stopped being fun for me, I stopped.
I don't exactly understand _why_ I lose control over regulating how much time I put into something like that, but I plainly do. Hence why I will never, ever pick up something like WoW or FF XIV. I would lose a few years of my life to it if I did, and might lose my job and my spouse along the way. :-P
I had moderate problems with losing control over regulating my time. For me, I could trace it very specifically to a formula - How much time it takes to progress at the rate I felt was appropriate. That could be levels gained, or quests/dungeons completed, or whatever. I felt a desire to maintain a certain linear amount of growth, and would spend enough time per week to gain that much. Part of the issue is that levels and quests take more time the further into the game you get. Going from level 1 to level 2 often takes only a few minutes, whereas gaining late game levels could take multiple hours of play. Also, when you level up quickly you can often find and wear new gear or other rewards, so you're getting those hits faster. By end game you may spend hours getting little to no reward. Playing an MMO in end game raids could often take hours to get a few drops to split between 20-100 people. The average person in the raid would likely spend 4+ hours to get between nothing and a minimal upgrade, with a handful getting a substantial upgrade. I stopped playing WoW (10+ years ago) when I was spending 2-3 nights a week playing 4+ hours a night and making very little progression. The guild wanted me to play more, and I could see how I could progress in other areas if I played a few more nights per week, and realized it was a trap. It bothered me at first, but gaining 10-20 hours a week to spend on other priorities definitely was the right choice over maybe gaining one or two gear upgrades, once I got over the sunk cost of all the time put into my character. That was the real insight for me, not thinking in terms of sunk costs but in terms of current and future enjoyment. Based on that realization, I tend to think about whether I will enjoy the full game before I purchase it or start to play it. Often the truth is that to fully play a game might take 40 hours, of which only 20 is truly enjoyable. If the game is cheap enough I might buy it to play for 20 hours, or I might just skip it.
Yeah, your point about the nature of late-game MMOs is exactly the thing I consider toxic / borderline-immoral about them. Like, they hijack a pro-social instinct -- you want to collaborate with your guild-mates -- and turn it into behavior that is unhealthy for the participants. Like, even spending two hours on gaming every day is _kind of a lot!_ When I was spending a couple hours on Ingress after work in the evening, and more on weekends, at least that meant I also was getting some exercise.
(Had already written most of this before I saw Kenny make a similar comment further down, though much more concise.)
That's basically what high-class restaurants do: not only do they serve meals ranging from something like 5 at the low end to double digits at the high end;
but the individual courses themselves not uncommonly consist of several individual food items that could be considered distinct dishes in their own right (eg in German-speaking countries I've often seen courses named things like "Dreierlei vom Schwein", which is a fancy way of saying "three different preparations of pork", and which are then separate small items on the plate).
At these kinds of meals, the individual items are often of a size that they can be eaten in about 2-3 bites, aka a single "hungry American" bite. Often, only the most central main course have food that requires more bites. Oh, and soup and such is am exception.
And *then* you have "tasting menus", where the whole point is that the entire meal consists of many individual "dishes" in portions that are designed to be eaten in a single, or at most two, bites. Those often have a somewhat less insane number of courses, maybe even downright normal (like, 4! can you imagine!) making up for it ny having a much more insane number of individual dishes per plate. I don't think I've personally seen a course with double digits dishes per plate, but that's probably mostly because it starts to look messy.
Recently I'm trying to follow the advice beeing mindfull to not overeat or overdrink (Alkohol). Was it here at Scott's or somewhere else where I learned that tastefull food and beverages lead to overconsumption - they told this might be aain cause of syndrome x around the globe. In our family we switched from sweet beaver ages to tap water and from white bread with marmelade or chocolate to whole grain bread with cheese. We all consume much less of the unsweetened, whole stuff compared with limonade or white bread with marmelade. It's just not so tasty and seems to prevent overeating. I guess on of the reasons that porridge is so good for not getting overweight is that it's so bad in taste if it's without fruits, sweets or so.
So long story short: I try to prevent or reduce a high consumption due to deliciousness...
> I would only engage with forms of gaming that had some kind of end-point I could reach.
Sadly, the incentives of the game producers seem to evolve in the opposite direction. Internet (ads and microtransactions) made it profitable to keep you playing as long as possible. Not doing that would feel like leaving money on the table.
Possible exception, if you are already planning to make a sequel. Then you at some moment want to give the player a happy ending, so that they can buy the next game.
Yeah, the shift towards treating games as a subscription service is unfortunate, though of course I understand the economic incentives behind it. When I read about Ubisoft's plan for creating "Assassin's Creed Infinite", as an ongoing updated service, I was just like, "welp, I guess when I finish Valhalla, I won't be playing any more AC."
As someone who has, for example, stayed up until four am on a school night two nights in a row reading a new comic series, I have expressed my love for art/books to be "at times bordering on addiction". However, although stopping might be very difficult, if there are several hours in between stopping and resuming, the urge to resume is much, much smaller.
I think it has something to do with which next 'want' is brought to the forefront of your mind when you are doing a task. There are many many things a human wants in their life but your attention can only really sit on one at a time. By eating a potato chip it fetches the want of "I want a potato chip" from the set of all wants and puts it front and center in your mind. Then it becomes both the thing you really want to act on next (cause its what sits in your attention at that moment) and it also feels bad when someone or something stops that want from being fulfilled (mum takes the bag of chips from you or turns off the tv when your 'movie want' is at the forefront of your attention)
I guess to add to this a flow state could kind of be thought of as a long chain of 'wants' which fetch the same 'want' from the pool of things you could want and brings it to your attention over and over. That's why often it can be hard to start 'flow' activities like say painting (as thinking of and focusing the first want is hard), but once you have started then the activity of painting makes you want to paint in the next moment and so on leading you to end up in a really content flow state where you can suddenly paint happily for hours.
Pretty sure addiction means the offending activity negatively impacts your living, you’re aware -although denial can exist- and you continue to engage in the behavior despite established risks/consequences. I don’t think watching a movie in one sitting equates.
Well, if you're getting angry that someone said hi while you were watching a movie, there's a problem, but it's not the interruption, it's the weird tendency to anger.
If you are robbing food banks to trade canned tuna for heroin, the problem isn't the addiction it is the weird tendency to steal?
What makes it about the anger/other antisocial behavior and not the addiction?
I mean there are some people on heroin that don't turn to a life of barter, but the addiction is a contributing factor isn't it?
I think for a lot of people, eating potato chips fulfills all of these criteria.
Staying up late, well past the point of reasonableness, is pretty common for people watching TV/Movies, reading books, or playing video games. It's also something that we are well aware of the negative effects and we continue to do it. Does that not meet the criteria?
> The first minute of watching a movie certainly isn’t the best
Sounds like you should try 5-second films! http://5secondfilms.com/
The first five seconds were pretty good, but the next 55 were really boring.
Chew your food! Take human bites!
That's probably an appropriate response, haha
Make them aware of how shitty it actually it
Somewhat related: if I'm craving ice cream I'll trick myself by going into the shop and getting a couple sample spoons to satisfy the craving, then leaving. Or at the frozen yogurt-by-weight places, I'lll get like $0.90 worth of frozen yogurt.
been there ... especially since the menu on the PC side is really limited compared to the TV side.
I'm sure that ice cream shop loves when you come around.
Reflected in the Abrahamic belief: Do not take false idols.
Do true idols have a different effect? Would be interesting to see some evidence in their favor, given that parting the seas and such seems to be out of fashion these days.
They sure do! It won't work for you if you don't genuinely believe (which makes a real scientific experiment difficult, if not impossible), but all of the traditional spiritual disciplines have the effect of lessening the power of addiction in a person's life. Fasting and tithing especially have this effect. Ask Christians how it feels to give something up for Lent. Muslims have Ramadan, I'm sure it's similar. Buddhists seem to have a practice of not eating after noon which I'll bet does the same thing. In fact, it's interesting to consider Buddhism in light of this post -- it seems like the world religion which addresses the problem of addiction the most directly.
I think you need to reanalyze that. Genuine belief is, itself, an addiction. It causes motivated reasoning that is impervious to evidence. This is why even the "flying spaghetti monster" is a trifle dangerous. Consider that there are actually people who believe the "birds aren't real" conspiracy. And they don't switch out of it even though it negatively affects their lives. Now consider that your favorite belief may be of the same nature. Perhaps it doesn't, or you believe it doesn't, negatively affect your life, but it's probably the same method in action.
I thought Birds Aren't Real was a joke.
It was created as a joke. Then some folks started believing in it. I don't know how many, but the point was that even really silly things can attract some folks who believe them. And once they believe, they are relatively immune to contrary evidence.
I'll fully admit to being biased, as I'm a spiritual person, but I think that once you start defining philosophical positions as "addictions", you've watered down and distorted the usage of the word far beyond the point of usefulness. A devout Christian or atheist is only comparable to a heroin addict if you're trying to take some kind of weird maximally-skeptical position.
No. It's valuable if you consider addiction a process with a gradient from trivial so strongly controlling. This implies that one is trying to model the processes of thought and action (whether or not successfully). So for me that's a valid meaning of addiction. Other purposes might (and do) reasonably use other definitions of addiction.
A devout Christian or atheist is a reasonably called an addict (to that belief) to the extent that their thought processes follow the same pattern. There are obvious similarities, but it's not really clear to me that the mechanism is the same. OTOH, it's certainly not clear that the mechanism is entirely different. There are multiple levels of similarity
That said, we don't really know enough about the internal mechanics to assert that they are the same. Only that they have certain reaction patterns in common. This could be because they use the same reinforcement mechanism, but there might be other reasons, though I haven't thought of any.
FWIW, I, also, consider myself a spiritual person, though not in any standard religion (including atheism as a religion). And I *do* have trouble applying this idea to my own religion. But I model this as the difficulty a hand has in bandaging itself rather than thinking it implies that the idea is wrong.
I think the issue is simpler: trying to analyze the spiritual and emotional with pure rationality is like trying to dissect a dog to find out why you love it. You might find out a lot about how the dog's body works, but not only will you fail to find your answer, you're also running the risk of destroying the thing you're trying to save.
I'll fully admit that, despite posting here, I'm not a hardcore rationalist. I think rationality is useful in some areas, but I also believe, quite strongly, that humans are too complex for simple solutions or explanations to accurately describe them- and "everything you like works just like addiction" is a VERY simple explanation. The fact it's also an insanely dangerous piece of psychic technology is besides the point.
Would you then say that other "moral" positions are also "addictions" with similar effect? Prohibitions on defrauding people or murder, are addictions as well?
I can kind of squint and see that maybe we are "addicted" (using the definition closer to Scott's post) to philosophical and moral positions, and would continue to pursue them even when they're not rationally optimal. I'm not sure I see the value in such a position if it also applies to strong positions that are generally seen as quite important for society.
There’s a strain of thought in the Jewish community which says that the religious practices are useful even in the absence of belief in God. https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-i-found-atheism-through-judaism-1.5382662
I'm currently looking into "Dopamine fasting", which is what it's come to be called in certain circles when you abstain from cheap sources of pleasure, whether or not it's a misnomer (though it seems plausible enough to me) in order to combat being "below baseline" when you're supposed to be doing other things (e.g. working, or enjoying time with your family).
The idea is that if you're below baseline due to splurging on cheap pleasures, you won't be able to be motivated or enjoy work or leisure - and after the initial fun, you're not even really enjoying the addictive behaviours you get cheap pleasure from either.
I used to think that browsing Reddit in my free time was totally harmless - like, I was t being productive but it was my free time so that's ok. But the talk around dopamine fasting and the like has now got me thinking that I am damaging my motivation systems when I indulge in these things, and they might be contributing to procrastination and motivation issues generally.
I've experimented with leaving my phone outside my bedroom, trying to read books more instead of Reddit, and those sorts of things, and think I have seen some limited success. I haven't taken it to the extreme yet, but am considering taking it further.
What really helped was when internetting became more boring once the pandemic (which I was obsessed with) was waning here in Australia. I was really productive at work after that. Now with the war in Ukraine Im once again...well, addicted to keeping up with the news. It really feels like an addiction in every relevant way.
Many religions have practices of abstaining from easy pleasures, and I take it seriously when there's a confluence of ancient wisdom and modern science, even if it's a bit of heterodox science that isn't very solid yet.
Interested in anyone else's experiences on this topic.
I think dopamine fasting is indeed a misnomer, and it partly stems from the general miscomprehension of the role of dopamine, but more importantly from our mislabeling and whitewashing of the modern vices.
Browsing social media, reddit, news seems innocuous on the face of it - you're just keeping informed! - but in reality, it's effectively gambling.
You're betting away your focus on the chance that you'll come across something that registers as "important". These algorithms are built like slots machines, drip feeding you content that's designed to engage, but only for very short periods of time; like potato chips, they are inherently limited in their ability to satiate you, precisely because their purveyors don't want you to stop.
I think "cheap pleasures" is also a misnomer that fails to convey the risks associated with them. The cheapness has nothing to do with value, cost or pleasure potential, but with focus and agency. Mindless pleasures, or pathological flow states, could be the better term: indulging in a bag of chips or a stream of content means surrendering your agency, turning on an autopilot designed by someone with a profit motive.
I believe the deeper we delve into our flow states the more we thrive, and in contrast, we're at our worst when we're scattered and anchorless. Greatness is achieved through persistence, but very little gets done by very little efforts.
No. Flow states are great for accomplishing a defined objective. But to be creative requires a combination of scattered and focused. These can't usually be done at the same time.
This doesn't mean I consider Reddit a good source of unfocused attention. Actually, I suspect even solitaire is better, preferably one of the mindless varieties where you just perform simple actions, and there is no good strategy. This can be what you put your focus on while the rest of your mind free associates.
Often, though, it's better to rapidly switch back and forth between focused and scattered. Rapidly here is often in the order of magnitude of once a minute.
"Dopamine fasting" is a case of a broken clock being right twice a day. The neuroscience and the psychology behind it is hot garbage, however, if you attempt it you'll accidentally remove a lot of non-obvious poison from your life. I suppose it's like mental elimination diet.
Reddit, news, discord etc. are mental junk food. It is difficult to limit their consumption but the upside is absolutely massive - I'm experimenting with a mostly async way of engaging with them, checking them at predetermined times of my day, and I freed up so. much. time. and mental energy it's unreal.
The framing I'd choose is that relaxing is also a skill and we're becoming increasingly terrible at it, starting with the invention of TV.
The exact neurotransmitter in question that you're trying to manipulate is outside my ken, but I think it's clear that what happens with the combination of smartphones and social media companies that make more money the longer they hold your attention, this stimulus affects the brain somehow or other, and can have certain negative effects on people's behavior, mood, attention span, ability to concentrate, etc. I think it's wise to find some means of self-regulation in this regard, whatever name you want to attach to it.
An observation, or thought experiment isn't 'heterodox science' its 'a hypothesis.'
This is the foundation of science, when you take some observations and try to draw a conclusion, take your hypothesis to your friends, and ask them their ideas on your hypothesis.
Hypo meaning 'under' or 'less than', and thesis being your argument. Its not a fully developed argument, but an under developed argument ... hypothesis.
When you've provided some good boundaries, you can promote your hypo-thesis to a theory, then banter about The DoubleUnPlussed Theory of Dopamine Fasting whilst chatting up chicks in the bar.
> (though it seems plausible enough to me)
It really isn't. Low dopamine is Not Good. But you can't accomplish that through 'dopamine fasting' anyway.
Actually, heroin is not pleasurable for most people when they first try it and the overwhelming majority of people who try heroin never get addicted. In fact, most who try the drug don’t even like it. Dan Rather, the former CBS anchorman, famously shot up heroin in the 1950s for a news story. Yet despite taking the drug, the reporter says heroin only gave him a “hell of a headache.” Rather’s reaction is not unique.
A 2012 study on healthy volunteers found that some 15 percent of people given an opioid reported a strong dislike of it. 50 percent of test subjects reported mixed results, neither strongly liking or disliking the sensation. Only 30 percent of people in the study found the sensation to be pleasant. Of those reporting that the drug made them feel good, only half said they would want to experience it again. That’s a pretty poor showing for the world’s most addictive substance.
Clearly, there's more to addiction than the substance being abused. I think you're right on the money saying it's an awareness problem.
More here: https://www.nirandfar.com/addiction
It’s dangerous to medicalize normal behavior. I’m skeptical about social media addiction as a wide ranging disorder. I’m sure some people get addicted to over using social media just as some people get addicted to just about any analgesic. However, the same can be said about a “friend addiction.” In many ways, focusing our attention on a product’s addictiveness, can make us want it more, as in the case of potato chips per Scott’s example.
It *is* dangerous, but that's because we don't really understand the medical part. It's also obviously correct, if done properly. You couldn't be alive without a huge number of medical processes (well, chemical, but that's much of what medicine manipulates). And, yes, friend addiction is just as really a medical/chemical process. There are two species of vole on different sides of a river. One species is monogamous and the other doesn't have family ties. They are EXTREMELY closely related. The major (known) difference between them is in their dopamine chemistry.
But biochemistry is fiendishly complicated, with all sorts of interactions that nobody can predict. That's why "medialize normal behavior" is dangerous. Because we tend to do it incorrectly. But it's obviously true, when done correctly. And it clearly governs social behaviors just as it governs more physical behaviors, like allergies. And note that in calling it biochemistry I'm oversimplifying it, as there are also, e.g., structural effects, that equally can be considered medical.
Well, its hard to imagine how one might unhealthily indulge a friend addiction the way one can a social media or opioids
AFAIK, heroin, like other opiates, is a pain killer. Pain killers are often effective against mental pains, as, e.g., social rejection. So I would suspect that its effectiveness is only strong against those in some kind of pain. Not necessarily physical pain.
FWIW, and IIRC, and if I trust my source, heroin was originally marketed as a non-addictive cough suppressing syrup. And they'd run tests to prove that it was non-addictive. (But the sample size was around 12 or 25 people.)
... I remember seeing it was named Heroin because it makes you feel like a Hero.
I really have no connection to it other than I had a friend whose wife and her sisters ... a total drug den there ... the wife would visit her sisters, use some heroin, then someone would call my friend, he'd go pick up his wife, completely wasted, raped—by whomever provided the heroin I guess ... my friend would bring her home, dump her on the living room floor where she'd lay for a day or so until she came out of it ... we'd just step over her.
When she did come out of it, there was the "you're never going to go back to your sister's again fight." But of course she wants to visit her sisters, and she promises to not take heroin ... lather, rinse, repeat.
What a disaster. I haven't seen them for 25 years, no desire to.
I took an opioid on a dare when I was 15 or so. My friend did too. We didn't even know what they were. I forgot I took it and mentioned about an hour later that I had never felt better in my life.
I suddenly realized "maybe this was the pill?" and Googled to find out what it was. I never looked back: my mission in life became "acquire opioids" from that moment forward.
I'm on buprenorphine maintenance now because I will absolutely, 100%, not even going to try to resist it, go get some heroin without it.
My friend, on the other hand, didn't really feel any different. I wonder if there's something biological there.
I agree that there is something biological there. The first time I smoked a cigarette & felt the nicotine hit, I thought "this is great! Where has this been all my life!" Was up to a pack a day within a couple weeks, smoked for years, and had a terrible time quitting. Even now, 20 years after quitting, I sometimes have dreams about smoking. But I've never had significant trouble with going overboard with alcohol or weed, both of which I've used socially for most of my adult life, or with cocaine, which I've tried a few times, or with opioids, which I've been prescribed a few times for pain.
I got opioids once, recently, when I needed something for a bad toothache and pharmacist gave me sth with codeine. I was surprised it's not prescription-only.
I was really curious what the effects would be; but it turned out not only that there were none; it didn't even help against the pain.
I write movies for a living and have worked on games too. For what it’s worth, the “flow state” you’re describing isn’t a neurological accident - it’s the point of (what might seem like) overly prescriptive story structures and “Save The Cat”-style formulas. The entertainment industry has been trying to figure out how to induce this state for a hundred years. It’s a moving target, but it’s not at all unintentional.
The problem is that the entertainment industry only wants to induce it for entertainment value. That is basically hijacking it.
Can you explain your definition of "entertainment value," and how it differs from a story you'd consider more valuable?
I'd like to repost a reply (I think?) somebody deleted: "Every storytelling medium tries to capture its audience's attention- that's what divides a good story from a mediocre one. Not unique to films, and certainly not sinister unless we want to venture deep into the weeds of 'everything is manipulation and abuse'." I agree with this and think I probably made this value proposition sound overly sinister in my initial comment.
That would be me: I deleted it because I was concerned it was needlessly adversarial, but I'm glad that you managed to see it and took it well.
I should have said entertainment rather than "entertainment value". Flow states should be used to accomplish something desirable. Admittedly "desirable" is rather vague, but playing a game is not, in and of itself, desirable. Neither is watching a movie. (Or reading a book, which is my vice.) They are only desirable in terms of their external effects. Relaxing a tense feeling is inherently desirable (though not always wise). Accomplishing a specified goal is inherently desirable (though others may disagree). But "capturing a Pokemon" isn't accomplishing any goal external to the game. So it is at most only desirable to the extent that the game itself is desirable.
Now if one talks of basketball or some such, the game provides exercise and various other skills that transfer external to the game. This is much less true of a computer game, and a LOT less true of a movie.
IOW, entertainment is only valuable to the extent that it has effects external to the entertainment. Those can be mental, physical, or some combination. When "flow states" are manipulated to pure entertainment, then it is hijacking an expensive process. It they could train the experiencer to induce flow states when needed, it would be valuable rather than hijacking.
I mean no disrespect, but I strongly disagree with "entertainment is only valuable to the extent that it has effects external to the entertainment."
Let's say the baseline goal is "enjoyment." Way below that goal is "I hated it or was bored" and way above that goal is "it gave me a new perspective I could apply to other areas of my life" or "I watched Green Book and it helped me Solve Racism (or whatever)." I think you've got to prioritize engaging with art for its own sake. That's why art is a distinct category from exercise, self-improvement, scholarship, etc. Your subjective emotional or intellectual reaction is *the point,* and not a middleman for whatever that reaction helps you achieve after you've experienced it.
This creates difficult areas of abstraction - I'd have to make a subjective case for why I thought 5 seasons of Breaking Bad were more "valuable" to me than 5 seasons of reality television - but that abstraction is where the beauty lies. When asked why they play, a basketball player might say "it keeps me in great shape" or "it's how I acquire money/awards/fame/whatever." But they could also just say "I love playing basketball." That would make sense too.
Art that is self-contained and has no external effects isn't art.
There are lots of subtle external effects that count as external effects, including giving someone a new perspective on something. Actually, that's the main thing that causes something to qualify as art, and is why many works of art will repay intense study. Consider "Metropolis" and the comment it makes on the relationship between people and powered machinery. Or StarWars, and the commentary it makes on the relationship between people and authority. (I don't have to agree with the message to recognize it.)
To say "I play basketball because I love it." would explain why they play it, but it wouldn't justify it. Many people like things that I strongly disapprove of, like harming unwilling subjects. Basketball has certain features that DO justify it. To me they don't act strongly enough that I'm willing to play it, but this doesn't mean they don't exist. I count relaxation in various senses as a plausible external effect for many works of entertainment, and if that's all they do, then I attribute to them the value of that relaxation. But if they are just time swallowers, then even if they are attractive I don't consider them to have ANY value. The value of an entertainment is solely determined by its external effects. If it's only effect is to induce additional time and effort to be spent on that entertainment, then it is of negative value.
I disagree so completely I can't even finish typing this comm
I want to preface this by saying I do not mean this as an insult: are you on the autism spectrum? I only ask because your mode of thinking is so completely divorced from the way the average human being thinks that the first explanation that pops into my head is that you're neurodivergent. I suspect that this is some kind of "intentional living" thing, but honestly the worldview you're espousing seems bloodless and mechanical. I can't imagine someone feeling actual happiness if they spend all of their time thinking like this.
Here's my question: is watching a sunrise acceptable by your heuristic? Not painting it or happening to see it while doing something else, just existing and watching the sunrise.
I'm surprised to find myself agreeing with you, but with a lot of missing content that I think you believe but didn't say.
Specifically, that "external effects" can be a huge number of things and may in fact exist so extensively that no one here truly disagrees with you. You did include relaxation, which is pretty big towards what most people use entertainment for. Especially if relaxation means more than just "I'm too stressed out to work, so here's a good way to take a break so I can work more later." Once you've crossed that Rubicon there may not be much disagreement left.
I have been on both sides of this coin, playing games for the sake of themselves as a teen versus now always thinking "What lasting effect do I get out of it?"
I'd get really excited about a game and pour in thousands of hours and unlock lots of progression (with varying neutral-to-negative effects on the rest of my life), then I'd eventually move on to another game. But I realized, after I moved on to another game, all the progression I'd done in the first didn't really matter to me anymore. What lasted was the other parts of my life I'd neglected, plus whatever experiences in the game made a lasting impression on me.
Now as an adult, I am much more focused on real-world goals like "keep my job", "marry my fiance", "save up and buy a house", etc, and I realize that fully immersing myself in a game is not how to obtain them. I still do play some, but now I think much more about the long term and what effect it will have on my out-of-game life.
Or as some would say, I am now pouring many thousands of hours into unlocking progression in a game called "Outside" (https://www.gamezone.com/originals/review-of-outside-the-best-free-to-play-mmorpg/).
yes, but this also applies to every form of human communication. Why do we write—arguably witty—blog posts, comments, sing songs, tell stories, etc. We do it to entertain our friends ... but sometimes we hire professional entertainers to entertain our friend, or ourselves ... which eventually leads to people like Antioch having a profession writing witty stories for production—cause—we want it enough, we'll pay for it.
You explain why its' done, but not why it is desirable that it be done. Communication is only valuable to the extent that it has some valuable effect external to that communication. In evolutionary time a main value was to strengthen the social bonds that held the tribe (well, group) together. Secondarily it could transfer useful information.
Lacking direct contact, the main purpose served by, e.g., this blog is to transfer useful information, with a secondary purpose of connecting a group of people. (It's secondary because the effect is so weak when there's no personal interaction.)
But the instincts that reinforce this behavior were evolved in evolutionary time, and the current situation is very different. So we end up desiring lots of things that are, at best, not really adaptive. Like things that are pure entertainment.
There is no reason to value anything over anything else. Saying "entertainment is the only valuable thing" is just as correct as what you're saying. I would suggest providing a context: valuable *for what purpose* — reproduction? The comments about evolution appear to indicate that you're identifying with your genes. But that's no more valid than someone who evaluates everything through pleasure or paperclips.
I think there's a third reason (blogging has value) it provides intellectual stimulation. Take this thread for instance, you brought up some very valid points, points which I had never considered before ... then I provide this third point, because your first two points didn't fully satisfy my ... (feelings, thoughts, desires) on why I read blogs.
So yes, I'm paying Freddie for the intellectual stimulation I receive in viewing, and exchanging ideas with others of like (or unlike) but open minds.
That one *is* tricky. I tend to consider "intellectual stimulation" a bet that "there's stuff there that will be useful in the future", but perhaps that doesn't cover everything. OTOH, if the residue is just "entertainment", then perhaps that residue isn't intrinsically valuable. (I.e., perhaps it's attractive because of evolutionary artifacts, but those artifacts aren't appropriate to the current environment.) So in that case I wouldn't consider that segment of "intellectual stimulation" valuable.
And note that part of why I'm responding is that it helps me clarify my own thoughts on the subject. I think of that as a bet that it will eventually be useful, but I could be wrong. (Not "I could lose that bet.", which is clearly true, but rather I might be misattributing why I'm doing it.)
Clearly I don't always analyze things this way. Normally I just follow my desires and do things that feel right, even if were I to analyze them I'd decide that they weren't valuable. Sometimes I clearly feel that the actions aren't valuable, but I do them anyway. (Often I'll get stuck in, e.g., computer solitaire, and know that I'm not getting anything of value out of it, but I'm stuck anyway. Other times it's a valuable defocusing mechanism, to allow non-central thoughts to float into consciousness and be evaluated, and perhaps developed.)
Anecdotally, I think the days/hours when I can find something so engrossing that I can hone in on it and notice until it's 4am are the best I have. Much of my life is quite monotonous, but if a new (or new to me) video game or book catches my eye in that special way, I give in as much as possible and just savor the ride while avoiding destroying other facets of my life. Certainly during those days I look dangerously addicted, but I know that the root cause is always fleeting novelty of the new experience that will quickly and naturally fade out, so I enjoy it while I can without being worried about a long term issue. It's rare enough that it never chains back to back.
I think the difference between my experience and a drug addict's is not the hyperfocus or enjoyment itself, but rather that I am fortunate that my poison comes with a rough but extant expiration date where it will no longer be interesting to me, and I just walk away. For an addict, this is where the chemical dependency kicks in and locks them into the miserable cycle
I have heard Andrew Huberman describe the journey of addiction (substance or otherwise) as a progressive narrowing of one's interests, and I find this to be pretty accurate.
I like that description as a starting point. I'd refine it by pointing out that the narrowing is usually a resultant outcome of addiction-driven behaviour. You start habitually smoking weed, and initially you assume that all the other stuff you do can seamlessly coexist with that habit; then you realise that being stoned makes you suck at talking to people at parties, so you go to less and less parties; you realise that being high makes it easier to watch movies instead of read novels, so you read less novels; go to the gym less; etc etc.
Your field of interest narrows, but often as a result of your becoming aware of how your wider interests are made difficult by being a drug user. It's a passive narrowing.
Chimes with Marc Lewis's work (See The Biology of Desire) and various other cognitive science people, and I think Buddha, sort of. Addiction being not a problem of compulsive desire, but one of narrowing of vision.
Relatedly, Paul Graham arguing in 2010 that technology is accelerating addictiveness: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
Also, that Frito-Lay tagline, "betcha can't eat just one", sounds like a conditional prediction market advocating definitively for eating zero potato chips. "Frito-Lay: eat zero or eat the whole damn bag -- there's no middle ground!"
And my obligatory comment that I suppose this all bodes well for Beeminder's future.
PS: Also related: https://manifold.markets/NcyRocks/will-the-commitments-community-have
To me that sounds like it necessitates buying single-serving bags of Lay's potato chips, rather than the big family sized bags.
Girl Scout cookies -- a vast conspiracy. Has anyone ever eaten just one? Of course not, the little rug rats know what they're about.
Basically, addiction has less to do with the magical quality of the substance and more to do with how the person approaches it and the quality of the environment. I read about a rat study in Civilized to Death the other day. The gist is that the researchers gave the rats access to sugary and heroin-laced water. Those rats that were placed in an environment with other rats and cool leisure possibilities (like rat wheels, tunnels, and whatnot) drank very little of the water and none of them overdosed. In contrast those rats who were deprived of all these earthly perks coped by drug-laced water, with all the consequences it entails. All this to say - I think people already caught up on the idea that addiction is more encompassing than making the dopamine system hyperactive (although that might still be the major component). Which begs the question: what do meaningful experiences (however you want to define them) posses that make us prefer them over a snortful of heroin?
Maybe there is a secondary, less immediate and less primitive reward system for "status" ( here I mean it in a very broad sense linked to progressive improvement: accumulation of social status, expertise, wealth, even physical self-improvement through training).
This is super important for humans which are intelligent social animals with a lot of plasticity, so this kind of long-ish term progress count a lot and evolution must have found ways to promote it, but it's also not so easy to immediately measure so maybe there is a more subtle/more abstract reward system at play, either in // or controlling the simple dopamine one.
Difficult to measure, but indeed it would predict simple addictions to be more of a problem where long term status is not modifiable, either because it does not exists (rats for example may be a little bit like humans, while non-plastic solitary animals should be instant addicts) or because the environment is such that nothing affect your "status" (trapped in low or high "status" that can not be affected by your actions, which obviously happen once isolated for example)
That study, known as Rat Park, is pretty controversial. Scott wrote a post arguing against it in 2017 https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/25/against-rat-park/.
Cool! thanks for linking that. Upon closer inspection, I don't think the thesis Scott proposed there and what I wrote differ that much. Quoting one of his concluding paragraphs: " But if having a happy family and doing meaningful work and so on are, I don’t know, a quarter as rewarding as heroin, then maybe you have an opportunity to use “““willpower””” to force yourself the rest of the way and take the only-a-quarter-as-rewarding option. If you have a crappy life that doesn’t have any other source of reward at all, then all the “““willpower””” in the world won’t save you."
But to be more precise in my claims: my first line reads "quality of environment" which refers to the rat study. But later on I generalize to "meaningful experiences", which is what I implicitly assume the environment provided for the rats.
Interesting. I think the examples Scott give some credit to my just-so story (I don't dare to write theory ;-): It's not being well off that protect, in fact it can be as dangerous as having nothing to loose, if you are so well off that your "status" will not bulge with addiction. This was clearly the case with Ogedei and quite a lot of celebrities, at least until the late stages of addiction. While if you are middle class, your status may take a hit quite early. I also think the genetic explanation is the main one (that's a very safe bet to explain any variation within a population or between populations anyway, nothing original here) but a the long term, status-focused reward system specific to plastic slow maturing social animals would be my go-to explanation for non-genetic effects, if any.
That's tricky. "non-genetic effects" can't exist. So what you're thinking of is variation in a genetically standardized population. The only problem is that last week (somewhere) I read a study that claimed that genetically standardized microorganisms in a standardized environment would have a random distribution of variations.
Now clearly we can't really *know* that what we think of as a "standardized environment" is perceived as such by the microorganisms, but it seems to me just as likely that there are quantum effects involved in ion-gate transmission decisions. Such random histories would amplify over time.
This would seem to imply that it's inherently impossible to assign causal effects for some macro-level decisions. Other times it's just ignorance. And we don't have decent grounds for deciding how much of the variation to assign to which "cause". And, of course, the distributions would not be separate.
So we end up with three causes, minimum. Genetic effects (including epigenetic), environmental, and random. And no pure states of any of them.
FWIW, I expect every "standardized strain" of lab rats to have had a lot of selection for things like "living well in cages" and "not biting the experimenters" and "not being terrified when picked up by a huge carnivorous animal", and probably lots of other things I haven't thought of. So I'm not sure how well their responses would map to those of a wild population. (That said, people aren't exactly a wild population, but the selection pressures have been different.)
To me this implies that one should be hesitant in considering that effects seen in an experiment on rats map well onto one involving humans. And hesitant in rejecting that consideration. (E.g. I've heard at least one claim that humans have a tendency to become more addicted to reward stimuli than do rats, but I've never been sure whether that claim was a joke.)
This tracks with my own experiences back when I was a daily cannabis user. I could happily go days or weeks without so much of a craving if I happened to be traveling or busy with some particularly engaging project at work or excited about a new romantic opportunity, but when I was having a slow week or feeling kind of down about myself, the idea of going 24 hours without hitting my vape filled me with dread and anxiety. Even the physical withdrawal symptoms like night sweats and insomnia depended heavily on my mental state and environment. At least in my limited experience with a single drug, the drug was functioning mostly as a distraction for things in my life I wasn't happy about and didn't want to deal with. The less I felt the need to distract myself, the less addicting the drug was, and vice versa.
One of the things I treasure most about the comments here is the constant reinforcement that people are really different from each other. I have never before heard of anyone having night sweats and insomnia as physical withdrawal symptoms from cannabis.
I do, first hand report from a very close one (long time low intensity, recreational user) so it's not a one point data ;-). And he got it not because of stopping but because accidental change of product (probably tbd-only instead of thc+tbd), so it's quite certainly pharmological, not nocebo.
> Which begs the question: what do meaningful experiences (however you want to define them) posses that make us prefer them over a snortful of heroin?
Nothing, in my case. Heroin is clearly superior to anything else I've ever experienced, and the only reason I quit is because I was becoming unable to get more heroin without significant damage to my ability to live (and therefore in the future acquire more heroin).
But I have an unusually strong preference for opioids, it seems.
In my experience, a key part of many addictions is avoiding difficult emotional situations. Something that fully absords or distracts you - "one facet becomes much stronger than everything else" - means you get a break from having to worry about other things that you don't have the emotional energy to deal with.
I try to build the habit of realising that I'm only doing something because it is distractively absorbing (in my case, pointlessly doomscrolling the news), and instead trying to make myself stop and journal about whatever is happening deeper in me emotionally that I'm trying to hide from.
In terms of the model above, it isn't just one thing becoming stronger, it is also other things that are painful becoming weaker that matters. The addiction can be ultimately dissastifying to the reward centres, but if it sucks up attention and hides the painful things, that is a short term reward in itself.
I've seen this in myself and others with alcohol, eating disorders, work. In moderation it isn't always bad - the relief from the emotional pain is a genuine relief. Addictions like (predictable, successful) work or (well made) video games can have the virtue that they make you feel like you have agency and productivity, so have less destructive side effects on self image and depressive thought patterns.
This maps well on to my own experience. It also leads into a clear feedback loop that can spiral out of control and ruin your life. Addictive behaviour suppresses emotional pain but causes longer term problems. This causes more emotional pain which makes the addictive behaviour more tempting.
Not a scientist, so take the ensuing thoughts with a pinch of salt but...
Is there an evolutionary angle to the phenomena you're describing?
If only the first few bites of food are tasty and then it's simply shovelling nutrients down your gullet, this makes sense from an evolutionary/survival POV: in a primitive scenario (mankind's lot for 99.9% of our existence) the purpose of the yummy taste is to get us to invest in the food source and keep going (the bait); then our body just wants us to mindlessly shovel down as much protein, carbs, whatever as we possibly can to improve our chances of survival.
So what about the "addiction" element in, for example, watching a movie or playing a video game? Well, let's return again to our (normal for most of human history) hunter-gatherer existence: in this state, activities in which we are investing a great deal of concentration and effort will have been geared towards surviving and/or passing on our genes.
Such relatively long term tasks might include working to extract food from difficult-to-access sources (individual nuts on a tree that each have to be picked, shelled with some difficulty before eating; grubs or insects extracted with a twig from inside the myriad crevices of a rotten log and so on). If you're engaged in such a task and are interrupted (forced to stop) it is upsetting because it's an interruption in meeting your basic survival needs.
Another example: hunters in primitive societies often rely on an exhaustive, meticulously observed scrutiny of their environment to (a) locate game and (b) catch it. This may entail staying in the same spot for many hours, barely moving, just observing, taking note of every movement in the grass or sudden flight of a bird. If your buddy strolls up mid way through this process and says "Hey! What's up?" all that good work of concentration is ruined and your chances of securing your calories for the day are diminished.
So when you get pissed because someone paused the movie, what you're really saying is: "You have just ruined my hunt and reduced my chances of survival!"
It's kinda weird to say that one is skeptical of a definition. Sure, that's a definition. There is a thing you can talk about: hijacking of your reward system by an externally administered chemical. Yes, you can get picky about trying to precisely define it so that food, oxygen etc.. don't count but at least relative to this society/environment we understand what counts.
Sure, that definition doesn't capture all things that are like addiction in terms of psychological behavior or neurology but it does capture an important/useful concept that's worth talking about so I don't think it can be dismissed as a bad or wrong definition. Chemical addictions have certain shared features (at least they do in our society...with different medical treatment/supervised usage who knows) and while you can counterexample almost any one feature that was claimed to be unique to chemical addictions it's still a useful concept for describing the world.
Sorry, I know that I'm being a bit pedantic and that you weren't denying that you could talk about the concept of external chemical addiction. However, I do think it raises the question of just what it was that you are claiming. Is the claim merely that, when you chunk the world up into concepts the way you find most salient or interesting that you'd not divide out the external chemical in this way? Or are you making a stronger claim about the neurological basis and how would we test it? I mean, of course, we all know that desires resemble addictions in some ways, but is there something more testable here?
This reminds me of the method I successfully used to quit both smoking and drinking. It came from Allen Carr's Easyway series. The books will not win any literary prizes but they were effective (at least for me, anyway, I know others who didn't have as much success).
He starts by asking the reader not to try quitting until they've finished the book and then repetitively drives home throughout the book that the pleasures derived from these addictions are illusury.
At the end he asks the reader then to mindfully (not the word he uses though) experience their last cigarette or drink. I remember feeling within my bones when I had my last smoke that it tasted horrible and gave me no pleasure whatsoever. Lo and behold, my nicotine craving was gone and I was from that day forward a non-smoker. So yes, I'm also sceptical about the chemical basis for addiction.
I repeated the process for alcohol, except that I wanted to cut down not quit. The book was cunningly called "The Easyway to control alcohol" so I thought it would help with this goal. It had the unexpected side-effect that I no longer felt the need to drink and so was a non-drinker when I finished that one and I have been ever since (9 years and counting)
Sounds exactly like my accidental last game of League of Legends. Most rounds I played were quite enjoyable, but I had one round where we were winning but my team couldn't close out the win for an hour and 20 minutes or so. We almost lost multiple times and it should have been thrilling, but I became very aware of how I felt through the entire game, casually mentioned mid game with the one person I was on voice with that this would be the last game I played and then afterwards haven't felt like picking it up again for many years. In spite of me sometimes intellectually wanting to pick it up, I might launch the game and log in, but never bring myself to hitting play.
Similar here. Played semi-competitively for about 7 years, then one day decided to actually pay attention to how the game made me feel. The overwhelming feeling was anger and frustration, so I uninstalled.
Quick math puts me at about 5500 hours spent playing, which would have been enough time to learn a language, learn python, get chartered, and be a better friend and son.
Oh, I didn't have the same feeling normally. Sure there were frustrations, but similar to any sport or challenge I put myself to. It probably helped that I always modeled the other players positively in my thoughts (I started playing back before all-chat was auto-muted, and I'm still friends to this day with people I met laning AGAINST me). Plus I don't have any illusion that I wouldn't have spent that time playing a different game. While I was playing League I pretty much didn't play any other video game. After I stopped I play some video games but typically board games fill the same slot.
I was talking to another friend who used to play piano quite well, and he said he went through a similar thing, while he generally found it rewarding one day while practicing he became particularly self-aware and afterwards he said it felt "hollow" and now have a slight involuntary revulsion when thinking about sitting down to play. Not enough that he doesn't enjoy listening to other people play, but the thought of playing himself feels slightly alien to him (his words).
The mechanism is interesting in that it seems similar when applied to a variety of subjects (smoking, gaming, playing music).
I had a very similar experience with quitting smoking, including the 'knowing in my bones that I was a non-smoker before I finished the book'. The same technique didn't work for alcohol for me - it needed three in-patient stints in rehab for that, but for smoking I'd heartily recommend Allen Carr's books. I happen to think he was a bit of a knob, but that didn't prevent his method working for me.
I draw the opposite conclusion that you do. Since a lot of the psychological manifestations of "addiction" is just normal motivational dynamics, the part in classical addictions that really deviates is the fact that they involve chemicals that bypass your Cartesian boundary to directly mess with your reward system. So the term "addiction" should be restricted to that, and other terms like "superstimuli" are more relevant when talking highly motivating but boundary-respecting factors.
I am not sure I understand this comment. What is the actual difference in the underlying views represented by saying someone is addicted to video games vs. video games are a superstimulus?
In my view, your body has evolved to maintain a certain I/O relation. You observe things with your senses, obtain nutrients through your mouth, and take action through your muscles.
You then have certain desires, which you seek out based on that I/O relation. A superstitious is something that appeals much more strongly to those desires than would be expected in the environment you evolved for, and can therefore lead to strange unbalanced stuff; but it still works through your standard I/O relation and appeals to your endogenous desires.
The desires are implemented in your brain in some complicated way, where you use your senses to predict achievement of your desires, which is then used to send out reward signals and such. Meanwhile, a chemical addiction bypasses this normal I/O relationship, and the endogenous generation of reward, to instead directly interfere with your reward signal.
Thanks, that helps. What is the significance of the difference between direct and indirect reward signal interference? Is it that behavior in the second case is more pathological from the perspective of beliefs/desires folk psychology? Is the payoff of making this distinction somehow related to the decades long Caplan/Alexander addiction debate?
I think it may help to consider what generalizations of the concept of "violating the I/O boundary" looks like. The simplest other instances of it would be stuff that gives you brain damage, e.g. lobotomy or sufficiently extreme blunt head trauma. These are cases where the skulls was supposed to protect your brain matter but failed to do so. They are fairly crude, though; a more advanced example would be something like rabies, which has evolved to spread via bites, which are caused by the mental insanity generated by the virus.
In my view, there's a natural category containing all of these and more; {chemical addictions, physical brain damage, brain germ infections}, where your behavior changes in ways not mediated by the natural I/O relation ("Cartesian boundary"), but instead via something that somehow bypasses it.
In a sense, it's closer to being "objectively pathological" - though labelling something as pathological is always a value judgement. The point is just that there's a non-value-judgement way that these things differ from normal psychological dynamics, which doesn't hold for "behavioral addictions". That doesn't necessarily mean that it would be more/less harmful, though there's probably a correlation.
And yeah, it could be said to be related to the Caplan/Alexander debate, though it doesn't take a definite stance on it.
Please watch this podcast https://youtu.be/QmOF0crdyRU by Stanford neuro biologist Andrew Huberman. As best as I can understand, There is no separate 'chemical addiction' pathway.
My point isn't about the parts of the pathway that chemical addiction uses, it's about the parts that it _doesn't_ use. Chemical addiction doesn't rely on your brain carefully assigning the stimulus a positive valence, instead it bypasses the brain's evaluation mechanisms to directly push the inner valence assignment buttons. Of course for "behaviorally addictive" stimuli, these same valence buttons also get used, but here they get activated by endogenous processes in the brain, making them less like chemical addictions and more like ego-dystonic preferences.
I think it's useful to draw a parallel between the addiction-vs-superstimulus idea and an idea Scott discussed in January in the context of AI safety: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/practically-a-book-review-yudkowsky?s=r
In section II, he talks about an AI metaphorically learning to "reach into its skull and increase the reward counter." If, say, a chess AI learns to do that, we can expect it to lose all motivation to play chess, and instead focus monomaniacally on increasing the reward counter directly, with probable destructive results.
That's basically what drugs do for people who become addicted to them: directly hack the brain's reward system. A drug addict has learned they can chemically stimulate/emulate a reward response on command. The brain has no real defense against this; the only upper limit to the intensity of a chemically-emulated reward response is the toxicity of the chemical. So the addict loses interest in all the things the system was designed to reward and focuses monomaniacally on using more drugs, with destructive results.
A superstimulus, on the other hand, *is* one of the things the system evolved to reward, just in a more intense or easier-to-obtain form. So in principle, the system is still working as intended, with the normal upper limits for reward intensity and the normal homeostatic mechanisms for balancing priorities; it's just skewed in favor of the superstimulus.
So you don't see e.g. food addicts abandoning their families in large numbers to live on the streets as they pour all their resources into obtaining and consuming more Skittles by any means necessary. You do see some clear distortion of priorities, sometimes severe, but not the wholesale hijacking that you do with drugs.
(One exception is Parkinson's patients treated with levodopa, who can develop some extreme behavioral addictions - typically gambling - probably because the medication increases the maximum reward intensity.)
This!
For things operating within normal motivation dynamics, your reward system is rate limited by whatever you body can normally produce.
Adding chemicals that interact with the underlying circuitry directly leads to some similar behaviors with very different kinds of treatments.
You can be pretty easily. Behaviorally therapized out of most behavioral addictions. It in principle can be done with chemical addiction but wow is it a lot less successful, and only works by typically forever swearing off the involved thing. (whereas the proper behavior modification to a video game addiction is to only play video games a reasonable amount.)
And I think you are really mischaracterizing withdrawal by calling the suffering from an unfilled desire withdrawal, even with the "micro" hedge. Withdrawal is more like being sick. Just like I don't think it would make sense to call it a "micro depression" when your favorite character in a TV show dies and you feel sad.
I say that this is about ease of intervention, or that it necessarily correlates that much with it. There are plenty of endogenous behaviors that are really hard to change because evolution has optimized you hard to satisfy them.
You should watch/listen to Andrew Huberman's podcast on dopamine( https://youtu.be/QmOF0crdyRU ), which, IMO, explains what you're talking about quite well. To elaborate - he discusses how ALL motivation and addiction works in the same way at the biological level - via dopamine.
I feel like this is the what meditators mean when they talk about cravings. The tendency you set out is why life can feel unsatisfactory, but training your mind not to react so strongly is the way to come to terms with it.
There's also a biochemical angle in which some addictive chemicals have withdrawal symptoms (usually due to prolonged exposure causing receptor downregulation). I don't think this exists for things like video games.
I reached a similar conclusion (everything can be addicted) after listening to this "dopamine masterclass" podcast episode from Andrew Huberman at stanford:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU&
Although I don't get that 'angry when stopping' business (my daughter sure does...), what this podcast described was a mechanism where things that make you feel good in the short term lower your baseline rate of dopamine (tonic release) for some period of time afterwards. This suggests that anything which releases dopamine can be "addictive" in the sense that you'll feel a craving for more, and have a 'come down' afterwards.
This lined up with my own experience where sometimes if i was in an extra stressful situation (i.e. my house is filled with cousins who've come to visit, and is therefore chaos), i would binge on carbs and also look at the news more often, the end result being i would feel like absolute shit after a few days. Each time i had the carbs or the news, i did feel better in the _short_ run, but in the long run i just felt worse.
This is exactly what it was like being addicted to, and then coming out of the addiction to cannabis, except the intensity and duration was lower.
I've posted about the exact same Huberman episode at, I think maybe only a few minutes before you. The parallel is very clear I think .
I can in fact just eat a single potato crisp without any problem.
The secret is that I don't like potato.crisps.
I resent anyone in line to get the burrito that will at best whelm me.
Mhm the flow state thing is very interesting to me. Probably why surfers stay in the water all day, at least that’s why I have when I’ve gone a few times. Probably the same with other types of flow state based activities like snowboarding, skiing etc.
"Addiction" feels like one of those fuzzy words that are mostly about emotional charge.
I am more "addicted" to water and oxygen than any heroinist. But since water is good for me, those addictions don't count.
I once took a bite of a Dove Bar and said it’s only the first bite that tastes truly fantastic. My wife offered to finish it for me. I declined.
A bar of Dove *chocolate*, or a bar of Dove *soap*?
Oh, a wise guy, eh? Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.
A funny wise guy though. :)
Note the lack of clarification from his suspiciously clean mouth.
Oh okay. If you’re going to make a federal case out of it…
https://www.dovechocolate.com/our-chocolate/ice-cream
Dove bars. Mmmmhhh
Ah, Dove chocolate covering a Dove soap bar. A truly cunning combination to throw of the investigators.
:)
This doesn't explain the whole phenomenon though. When I'm eating a huge bag of chips that (even) I cannot finish in one sitting, I will suddenly feel a repulsion towards the bag when I'm full. There was no tapering off. I was stuffing my mouth with chips, and suddenly I feel revulsion towards it. Can this be explained by the theory of feeding my addiction just to feel normal?
Most surprising of your posts, yet. This one sounded like "pretty obvious stuff everyone kinda knows to be more or less true." Video games addictive: hell, yes. I remember cycling through the Eurasian steppe and then feeling a strong urge to play. - Not as in “not what I want”, but: "that is a want I would rather not feel now, but sure: "I want it"". But then I also used to feel "I want sex", when I 'd better focused on another topic. ;) - Movies/stories: maybe a somewhat different neuro-mechanic, but eagerness for the next episode of GoT, BB or Charles Dickens sequel + hate to be interrupted: yep. You are just surprisingly(?) normal here. Welcome to the monkey house!
Bit of a meta comment, but "pretty obvious stuff everyone kinda knows to be more or less true" reminds me of this old post by Scott https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/02/non-expert-explanation/
Always nice to read an SSC-post again :) That one was simple/plain too, indeed. Maybe better links? -Anyways, the new post has a lively comment section. Me not negative, I am very fine with XKCD at times doing a joke at smbc -level, at least I get it then.
The appeal of the chemical model of addiction is that it provides a clear boundary around what is and isn't addiction. The microaddiction model seems like it risks collapsing into "anything that stimulates your reward center is addictive". If not everything is addictive then what's the principle that allows us to declare some things nonaddictive, and if everything is addictive then haven't you just redefined the word into a synonym for "enjoyable"?
This goes back to the concept of bimodal vs. unimodal distributions. It's useful to know whether we're dealing with 'everything enjoyable is addictive, and it just ranges from less to more addictive; 'addictive' things are those past a certain threshold' and 'addictiveness is a property which is significantly orthogonal to 'enjoyable', and we can objectively distinguish addictive and non-addictive things (at least in their central cases.)'
There's a whole line of interesting work in cognitive neuroscience on how addiction dissociates "wanting" (i.e. motivation to pursue something) from actually "liking" it. Seems related to this idea. E.g. good review paper here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.466.8030&rep=rep1&type=pdf
An interesting thing here is that addictive behavior towards food exists on a spectrum that includes binge eating disorder (BED) at the high end. I'm not an expect on this subject, but BED bears some resemblance to more traditional addictions in that it involves the feeling of a loss of control and the feeling that the addictive behavior is negatively impacting one's life. On the flip side, addictive behavior toward non-food stimuli like social media and video games also falls on a spectrum. There are lots of ways to arrange this spectrum, but I think ADHD seems like it could be described as one extreme, in that it often involves being unable to avoid stimuli to the point of seriously negatively impacting one's life. And guess what, the same drug, Vyvanse, is approved to treat both ADHD and binge eating disorder!
"Are flow states just another word for microaddictions?"
I don't think this is quite correct. Can we reformulate as: "Are the rewards of specific flow states the same as the rewards that lead us to microaddictions?" If so, I think the answer is that there are common chemical elements, but the contexts in which we experience them are qualitatively different (although it's not a binary contrast, and you can create borderline dilemmas).
The psychologist who coined the term flow, Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi, discussed resemblances between flow state ideals (performative artistry, sports achievement, etc.) and "addictions" (e.g., to gambling, sex) in work he published in the mid-'70s, long before his book "Flow." (Now video games are standard vehicles for measuring flow states in the lab.) An essential feature of Csikszentmilhayi's notion of "flow" is that the rewarding state involves the deployment of mastered skills (generally physical, but potentially intellectual). It has to do with "being in the groove" while doing something for a pre-imagined end. The association between the goal, the exercise of skill above a triggering threshold of complexity and duration, and the chemical experience is intrinsic to the meaning of the term "flow." At the end of the flow state, when a temporarily diminished or lost sense of reflective self returns, part of the experience is the residue of achievement that remains--the well executed ski run, expressive piano performance, quickly composed poem, and so forth. Those features can be distinguished, both through context and residual physical and psychological states, from the experiences and aftermaths of what actors themselves may be willing to name as "compulsive" gambling, sex, etc, which possess identifiers of what we mean by "addiction." The distinctions are as significant as the common features. Flow activities can become compulsive or obsessive, but they don't have to and very frequently don't. The essential element of the flow state is the experience of apparent autonomy of holistic skill operation, with minimal involvement of reflective intervention or sense of self-awareness.
I don't think that drugs are incompatible with flow experiences. Certain drugs might enhance performance, or psychedelics taken with "mystical" goals that are sought in the midst of an altered state might have goal/result structures similar to flow. But basically passive engagement that does not have a challenge/skill dynamic doesn't fit the definition of flow. (Some flow activities, like advanced Zen meditation, may appear passive, but require active discipline and skill engagement.) I think video games and card games are good borderline examples, hard to sort into or out of the "flow" category and probably falling to both sides of the line in specific cases. But I think potato chip eating, movie watching [I can think of exceptions], and the great majority of everyday drug experiences lack the context that turns dopamine into "flow."
I agree that drugs are compatible with flow experiences - a good example is playing music. Indeed, musical performers using drugs is a stereotype. I'm somewhat sceptical whether they actually enhance performance.
Flow involves inhibition of the brain's executive function (the neocortex activity that includes conscious reflection) and more autonomous expression of learned behaviors activated through other brain areas, which is why the state is called "autotelic." If you've invested well in consciously directed training of the body (e.g., well-formed finger action in playing an instrument), perfect execution is enabled by withdrawing conscious direction in performance. (Thinking about your finger action will muck up your music.) The reflective work of the cortex is reduced towards minimal monitoring/correction (we consciously steer the wheel as we drive only when we notice slight drifts from lane center)--the performer is free to focus on the music and audience (the road, rather than the steering wheel). It makes sense that some drugs could help suppress counterproductive cortical interference, helping performance, but also that the same drugs could make the reflective mind slow to re-engage when performance strays off course. (The music performed matters too: a stoned Myles Davis could stray far without course correction successfully; Yo-yo Ma cannot.)
I agree. I would call the experience of watching a great movie "absorption," or "imaginative Involvement,"not "flow". Flow involves skillful performance.
So, you're applying the concept of the hedonic treadmill to small-scale experiences alongside the observation that people don't like to stop doing things they enjoy?
Question: Are there people denying that gambling addictions are "real" addictions?
Maybe this is actually a significant argument in psychiatry, but as a layman, I've never encountered this "purely chemical definition" of addiction.
Let me talk about smoking for a moment, though. I used to smoke. I'd still prefer to smoke than not smoke, holding all other preferences aside, but I do have other preferences, so I don't smoke. It's been years since I've smoked, at this point; any chemical concept of addiction simply doesn't apply.
Smoking is just pleasant. Nicotine is, basically, my favorite drug, and I've experimented with many of them over the years. This is how I feel now, and it was, exactly and entirely, why stopping smoking was difficult.
Is that addiction? That's basically just saying that a preference is equivalent to addiction.
Now, there's a stronger case to be made for, say, coffee, which has unpleasant withdrawal effects. I am physically addicted to coffee. But also I routinely quit drinking coffee, deal with the withdrawal, and then later go back to drinking coffee; I'll even deliberately do this for a tolerance break a couple of times a year. As with nicotine, I like caffeine, and over the years I've grown to like the taste of coffee, as well. But the thing I could point at with coffee, the physical symptoms of withdrawal, basically make no difference to my behavior; if we call that addiction, well, that's distinct from preference as addiction, but also it fails to capture the behaviors society regards as problematic with regard to addiction.
This is part of the never-ending DSM wars. The DSM currently defines substance abuse disorders (related to the use of drugs) and gambling disorder (which was controversial but is now in there and very similar to the substance abuse ones) but no other so-called "behavioral disorders."
Here's a discussion of "internet gaming disorder" and the debate over whether it should be included in the DSM: https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/internet-gaming
Psychiatric researchers have a tough job because they are both trying to answer a fact question: "are the forces that cause chemical dependency and the forces that cause behavior dependency similar enough to be considered the same force" *and* trying to provide their practitioners with tools to help their patients.
That's how you get bad ideas like "adjustment disorder" making their way into published literature and not being questioned particularly hard. Adjustment disorder is basically just "still being depressed or anxious after a major life event after six months." So if your husband of 40 years died a year ago and you're still depressed about it, you have adjustment disorder. That's insane. But...if they call it a disorder it gives practitioners a code they can put down on a sheet of paper to justify the expense of potentially necessary therapy to an insurer.
Probably the reluctance to classify clearly addictive behavior as addiction is more complicated than that, and likely political. Essentially, they're concerned that if they are perceived as pathologizing character flaws, they will struggle to get society as a whole to take the idea of addiction seriously. They have a vested interest in the decriminalization of drug possession, and are now making good progress on that. If they start saying "also playing video games is addiction, and eating badly is addiction, and etc." then the personal responsibility people will use that as argument that nobody wants anyone to be responsible for their own actions, and more people will be convinced by that.
In modern politics/culture wars, nobody can be seen to be admitting weakness, so it's unacceptable to say, "Well addiction really exists on a continuum, and even most people who use drugs in harmful ways can't be said to be addicted. Meanwhile you can be addicted to things that aren't drugs, because the mechanism for addiction is multifaceted. The question is whether the person genuinely cannot control the behavior, which is a matter of individual judgement." Instead you need a bright line, and any data that blurs that line will be ignored or attacked.
Adjustment disorder is a funny diagnosis because it's perhaps the most commonly used one in outpatient psychotherapy to address what happens when someone gets hit by a life change that's something short of life-threatening but they're having trouble coping with it -- divorce, job loss, relocation, etc. It's only supposed to be diagnosed when it's within three months of the stressful life event and if the symptoms persist six months after the stressor is resolved, the diagnosis should be changed to something else (anxiety, depression, etc). If your husband died 40 years ago and you're depressed now, adjustment disorder is definitely not the proper diagnosis. If your husband moved out two months ago and you're having trouble going to work or getting out of bed, that may be adjustment disorder.
I don't love the DSM and am not a huge believer in its categories, but sometimes it makes for interesting reading. Most of the substance use disorder diagnoses have criteria that speak more to the behaviors around the substance use, rather than to volume or frequency of use or chemical dependency per se. Has the person wanted to stop and tried but been unable to? Is their use of the substance interfering with work, school, parenting, or other valued arenas of functioning? Is the person getting in trouble with the law around their habit? Are they spending huge amounts of time planning to and acquiring said substance? Is all of this causing them distress?
sorry, I think there was a small misunderstanding: The marriage was 40 years old in my hypothetical, not the death :P
Oh yes, I read it wrong! My point still stands but it's splitting hairs now. You're not supposed to diagnose adjustment disorder for an event that happened more than three months prior and you're not supposed to maintain the diagnosis for longer than six months after the event. But many clinicians don't observe those diagnostic requirements and diagnose it whenever someone seems to be suffering from a fairly recent stressor that's significantly impairing mood and functioning but symptoms don't qualify for PTSD. A diagnosis of adjustment disorder is often converted to one for depression or anxiety if the symptoms don't resolve in few months. At any rate, it's not clear to me why adjustment disorder is a bad idea?
It's not a bad idea, exactly. I'm not a huge fan of pathologizing what appears to me to be a normal grieving process + normal human variability. I think in the system we have, it's completely reasonable to have a diagnostic label to get people help when they need it. But it's yet another way in which psychology ( or capitalism/industrial society/community-less, godless heathens, depending on your persuasion) starts from the assumption that there is a normal way to be a human being and that every deviation from that is somehow a deviation from the ideal.
I agree with you 1000% on that. I'm a therapist working my way out from under the diagnosing frame after doing it that way for a long time in order to maximize people's access to care. I can't do it that way anymore.
And yet, I know a lot of therapists who work mainly with people in their teens and 20s who find that people in that age range who are having to get through high school and college and are so subject to intense "normifying" pressure, appreciate having diagnoses like ADHD or ASD or social anxiety, etc because it gives them a path to more self-acceptance and/or a little breathing room inside the strict and insane requirements of institutions. I myself feel pretty ambivalent about that but not for me to say for other people what's helpful.
As another example of what I'm talking about: I clearly have ADHD according to the DSM. I've been diagnosed and I take stimulant medication for it. The medication is helpful, and with the help of medication and therapy I have been able to change my career to something better suited to the way my mind works. My life is approximately one infinity times better than it would have been without the diagnosis. I would never ever wish that ADHD was not a diagnosable condition, because without it, it's possible that extreme anxiety and depression resulting from career instability and poor sleep hygiene would have actually led to my death.
By some estimates 10% of the population has ADHD. If 10% of your population has a mental disorder, it's not a mental disorder it's just a way people are sometimes. The only context in which I and 10% of my fellow human beings are "disordered" is one in which the only reasonable way to support oneself is to make oneself available to an employer from 8-6 every day, working at a steady, even pace on tasks as they are assigned. There's no reason that should be the only work paradigm. There's no reason for society not to have room for people who occasionally work 30 hours straight on a project they're excited about and then sleep for two days. That's an obvious value add. But because we assume there is a "correct" way to be human, that is a "disordered" way of life.
Potentially, small doses of stimulants for us would be good in any context. But because stimulant use is so tightly controlled, the only way to receive stimulant medication is through rigid diagnostics. Likewise, work accommodations for a person who is powerfully motivated and enthusiastic, but not entirely reliable, should not be medicalized. That's just a normal thing an employer should do to get the most value out of their employees!
Tl;dr: We have created a system in which every person has to be treated as a square peg, and then we provide psychiatric tools to make round pegs more square - that's not a problem with psychiatry, exactly. But society does have round holes, and we'd all be better off if we just let round pegs go in those.
Any thoughts on how this applies to those with Binge Eating Disorder? The most common thing I hear from my BED patients is their inability to stop eating once they've taken a bite of a problem food. If they're in public, though, they're usually able to moderate the amount of chips, chocolate, candies, etc. they're eating.
Maybe I just have low willpower (and an ADHD diagnosis, but it's hard to tell how much that actually means anything given the hand-wavey requirements for such a diagnosis) but there are just so many times that I am doing a stimulating activity and cannot stop despite most of my higher faculties telling me to do so. That may not be "addiction." It seems useful to distinguish between this and the more destructive forces of drugs that will literally kill you if you stop taking them. But if not I don't know that we have a good word for what it is.
And while it may not be the same force that can kill a heroin user or heavy alcohol drinker if they try to stop cold turkey, I suspect it's the same force that causes people to spend their whole lives smoking pot.
This sort of speculation is obviously analogical, but for me it hits the sweet spot between being empirically grounded (but obvious or detail-laden) and being a diverting flight of fancy (verging on the purely subjective). The low epistemic status you assign it is actually for me a symptom of what is most appealing - but this is coupled with its being extremely plausible and coherent.
My only complaint is that it cut off way too soon. Totally broke my flow.
Slightly unrelated, but I’m curious whether taking naloxone is unpleasant for people who aren’t regular opiate users.
I was watching a YouTube video where the person allegedly got addicted to sun exposure (apparently it triggers some endogenous opiate receptors), took naloxone, and experienced opiate withdrawal symptoms. But he didn’t try the naloxone before the sunbathing stint (at least not on video), and also didn’t control for a placebo effect.
FWIW I know of only one case of a non-opioid-user taking naloxone (in an actually effective way — oral is almost pointless), and yes, they hated it. But that's an N of 1.
What if "addiction" and "focus" are two sides of the same coin? When I'm really productive in my home office, and the kids barge in complaining that one of the others was looking at them wrong, I get frustrated. I'm less frustrated if I was between activities. I'm more frustrated if I've tried multiple times to start an activity, but keep getting interrupted.
If you're focusing on a story (reading, watching, or listening) and you're suddenly interrupted, the problem isn't one of 'flow' but of focus. If your current activity requires you to put multiple things together at the same time, you need to focus or you'll lose the thread and have to start all over again.
I'm not sure how to connect this to potato chips, but it fits the experience with video games and TV shows. It's possible the same system that's responsible for rewarding you for being focused writing an important email is rewarding you for being focused playing a video game or understanding a complex plot. Indeed, many apps that market themselves as 'zen games' are designed to allow you to put them down at any point without losing focus/flow.
This effect being noticeable might be the central defining trait of things we call "superstimulus" vs. things we call "Tuesday."
Breaking with consensus, I think this is straying a bit far into the trap of "Let's pathologize literally every aspect of the human experience" that psychiatrists of both the professional and armchair varieties tend to stumble into.
Yeah, taste-bud burnout can happen. I honestly assumed everyone noticed this and I've never had a real issue with it. But it's certainly not a universal or certain event, and I wouldn't describe it as a very small addiction. And then extending this beyond food to watching TV or film (and inviting logical extension to literally anything that makes people happy) strays into the bizarre.
It's an interesting thought, but I think its low epistemic confidence is deserved; a bit too much of a shower thought.
This doesn't match my experience at all, but it is possible this has to do with the nature of the food I'm eating versus what you are. I work from home, so cook all of my own food from raw ingredients, even making my own tortillas, salsas, broth, everything short of slaughtering my own animals and milling my own grain. So nothing mass-produced where the company is trying to make it addictive and I don't add sugar to anything. But I absolutely do not develop a tolerance or tapering off of food goodness. The last bite is just as good as the first. Another possibility is food is eventually subject to diminishing marginal utility, but mostly when you're eating more than you need, and I'm not doing that.
Also, thanks to a history of spine injuries and surgery recovery, I've been on opioids for pretty long periods of time. Tolerance and addiction may be related in some way, but they are definitely not the same thing. I did find the first few doses euphoric and later doses not. Effectiveness at pain relief also decreased a bit eventually, though it isn't always easy to tell because pain usually decreases as you heal anyway. Nonetheless, in spite of both enjoying it and apparently developing some level of tolerance or adaptation to it, I never got addicted. I took Percocet quite regularly for over three years and had zero trouble stopping when I didn't need it any more.
In Sam Quinones’ book “The least of us” he discusses animal research showing that the ones that had been encouraged to be sugar-addicted had different - more addictive - responses to opiates.
Do you have workable definitions for awareness and mindfulness? At the beginning of the article you talk about being mindful of the presence or absence of pleasure when eating, but it's pretty clear that the same process would happen even if you weren't being mindful. But at the end you speculate that addiction is about being hyper-aware of one facet of being motivated. Clearly addiction can happen without mindfulness, so mindfulness must be different from awareness, as you define the words.
I started reading the article expecting mindfulness and awareness to basically be the same thing, and I agree about how the mindful eating works, so if we use my intuitive ideas about the meanings of the words awareness must not be required for addiction. As I write this I can't fill in the blanks -- I don't have definitions I like of awareness, mindfulness, or addiction.
1. Some foods/food additives work on neurotransmitters in a chemical way. My first question here was “which brand of potato chips?” because some have additives that do this. There may already be an ACX/SSC article on the evidence for or against high fructose corn syrup doing this to some people. For myself there are a few chemicals that hit like a ton of bricks and it’s unpleasant enough that I make effort to avoid them (I am somewhat sure it’s those, and further personal research is unpleasant enough to not be worth it.) Others find those pleasant though or at least habit-forming. Some of the dust-type flavors on some chip brands will do this (sour cream & onion Pringles is one, there are many others.)
2. Flow state - I think repetitive stationary activities open up a type of cognitive processing which doesn’t always happen in awareness consciously. When I get the most annoyed at being interrupted in a movie or game, it’s usually this other processing that hates being interrupted. Leaving the game itself isn’t so bad, but that other track takes a while to get going and doesn’t want to stop. Depending on other life circumstances, people who need this processing will get very protective of their methods. Something might look like a compulsion or addiction, but it’s more like “I have to claim I really need this, or they’ll never leave me alone long enough to finish my thoughts about other topic Z.”
“ Opioids can still stimulate your reward system more strongly than video games and potato chips can, but not for lack of trying by Activision and Frito-Lay Inc.”
Is that true? Millions of people try opioids every year, they can me fentanyl at my last colonoscopy as an example. And people have surgery, dental work, etc. But only a very small percentage become addicted.
Everyone eats food but only a small percentage end up 900 pounds. Food is obviously more complicated as quitting food cold Turkey is 100% fatal.
As there are all manner of recognized behavioral addictions (including food) I think you're headed in the right direction here. But, truth be told, depending how you look at brain function, it's all a chemical addiction. When you over stimulate your dopamine producing brain parts, by for instance binging on porn, you do cause the brain to produce additional receptors, so you need more and more to get the same result. Which means that when you aren't binging on it you can't produce enough dopamine to be happy. Same thing probably happens when you get interrupted in the middle of the "flow state". Your brain is expecting the next dopamine molecule to pop in and it doesn't. So you feel bad.
Interesting stuff. This piece was an eye-opener for me on this subject: https://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/binge-watching-boethius-after-dark
In a way, I wish this happened to me with food. It doesn't. I have to be truly satiated before I perceive tasty food as less tasty. Twenty bites doesn't even begin to cause that to happen. I'm having a mildly difficult time believing your experience can be real. I mean, I believe it, but it seems very odd. As a side note, I own more than 200 cookbooks.
I'm a writer. When I'm in writing in a flow state, I experience a distinctive, unpleasant physical sensation when someone interrupts me. If I've forgotten to mute my phone and it rings, well, I'm too old to throw a temper tantrum, but I certain indulge in a curt tone as I answer.
Is 'motivational hyper-awareness' that which is mediated by ΔFosB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSB)? From what I understand, ΔFosB is implicated in reward salience and just keeps building up with chronic exposure to addictive substances.
I'm interested to know if ΔFosB might be an under-considered target for anti-addition interventions, as well as if it plays a computationally interesting role in reinforcement learning. Curiously, the neurocorrelate/MoA-knowledgeable people I know don't often talk about this mechanism - is that because it is uninteresting, weirdly hard to pharmacologically target, or just that more basic reward system stuff gets all the attention?
You're thinking is sound.
"The reward system" is a useful phrase for identifying brain regions involved in reward. But introspectively, I seem to have many different reward percepts. I would think each different reward qualia ought to count as a different reward mechanism, because what seems to happen in a potato-chip eating frenzy is that one particular reward signal outcompetes others. I am sometimes conscious while eating potato chips that I'm no longer enjoying them and do not, in fact, want more of them; would even like to stop; yet my arm keeps on reaching into the bag and stuffing them into my mouth. It's a confusing brain state, and "reward system activated" seems an inadequate summary of it.
I'm pretty sure my own perception of this experience is not universal, because I've watched lots of videos recently about how to lose fat, in which the leanest, most-successful fat-losers--say, Jeff Cavaliere Athlean-X Dot Com (his full legal name)--say "Just stop eating junk food!" They've clearly never experienced a diet blackout, in which you wander through the house apparently (to your conscious mind) at random, and then end up in the kitchen, where your conscious awareness fades for a few seconds until you "wake up" and discover your arm has reached out, grabbed some food, and stuffed it into your mouth. I think these super-lean people just have a defective hunger system.
I'm perplexed as to why we respond so much more strongly and quickly to food deprivation than to water deprivation. Most of us could survive 3 days on our water reserves, and months on our fat reserves. So why is it harder to go a full day without eating than without drinking?
As to movies and stories, I think that's quite different. Stories are, contrary to Aristotle's *Poetics*, very cognitive. A traditional story arc has a complex grammar to it, which involves a fractal structure of reversals and new initiatives, callbacks to earlier foreshadowings, the closing-off at the end of issues raised near the beginning, and tying the plot in several places to a theme which parallels it. Classical music is very similar in structure. Rhetoric involves similar principles.
I'll consider 'addictions' to e.g. video games more than just metaphorical when you show me someone who emptied their bank account and is giving $5 blowjobs to get an Xbox or another bag of potato chips.
So you're implying that 100% of property crimes are committed by addicts? I think you'd have a hard time convincing anyone of that.
People commit crimes for all kinds of reasons. People steal to eat all the time. Are those people addicted to food?
Also, I'll go ahead and point out that 'commiting crimes' and 'giving $5 blowjobs' are very different things and imply vastly different motivational factors. That's why I picked that specific behavior. Anyone can steal. Only someone with their feet to the neurochemical fire engages in things like $5 bjs. And Xbox-wanters don't do that. That strikes me as dispositive w/r/t to the question of whether 'gaming addiction' is fundamentally similar to 'heroin addiction'.
The description of hyper-awareness of one facet of the motivation system is intriguing, but it seems to match various forms of arousal more than addiction per se. Addiction is usually defined in terms of a compulsive behavior. The example of "mindful eating" that the piece begins with doesn't sound much like an addiction, even a micro one, in that there was no compulsive element; it was just a weird effect of mindfulness applied to something we normally do unmindfully.
How would one test this model and differentiate it from the alternatives?
This is similar to the reinforcer pathology view of addiction, which involves an overconsumption of a reinforcer in the face of aversive consequences. (Reinforcer here in the behavioral sense). From this view, many things can be considered addictive beyond drugs, like food, sex, or video games.
From my own experience, becoming less pleasurable over time is not an inherent property of addictions. I have an actual physical addiction to caffeine (get a headache on a day I don't have it), but I still enjoy it as much as the first time I drank coffee. And when I eat junk food that I like, I feel like I enjoy it equally the whole time. (Sometimes I'll compulsively eat a snack I don't really like just because it's sweet or salty and in front of me, but that's different.)
Yep, the part about diminishing returns when eating is not relatable content for me. Even when distracted, I tend to savor every bite of something I'm lucky enough to find delicious.
Yeah, I never stopped loving opioids. Never. The last dose was as good as the first, ten years before.
I do not notice that tasty food becomes less tasty for me. I just tried this with French fries and ice cream, and they tasted good until I was full.
Additionally, heroin never stops feeling good, adjusted for tolerance. Even without increasing dose, it still feels good at first — just doesn't last as long as it used to.
Chemicals are the -only- way you think.
If you are talking about things that you like, but are not actually addictive, then you are describing either adaptation or habitation, which are similar in outcome, but have different mechanisms. Basically, you don't feel as much of the effects of sensory stimulation the tenth time as the first time.
On the other hand, if you are dealing with things that are actually addictive, they have three properties: desire (you really enjoy it), withdrawal (you feel bad when you no longer can get it), and tolerance (you get less and less enjoyment with repeated experiences). The reason for withdrawal and tolerance is that the body does not like to be disturbed and if the drug (or whatever) disrupts its homeostasis, it produces a compensatory response that negates the drug (or whatever) effect. That's why addictive drugs have less and less of an effect as the body gets better snd better at negating their actions. Pavlov pointed out that the body does this by responding to the environmental cues that predict the onset of the drug. If the environmental cues that have predicted the drug are there, but the drug is not, you just get the negating effects that constitute the withdrawal symptoms, which are always the opposite of the drug effects.
i'm reminded of david foster wallace's definition of malignant addiction. it's a habit that causes problems while also appearing to be the solution to those problems. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram%3A+television+and+U.S.+fiction.-a013952319
Paul Grahams essay "The acceleration of addictiveness" is a great add on to the last sentence "...other ways are rapidly catching up". There's obviously plenty of people addicted to drugs, but in the 21st century we're starting to see more and more people "addicted" to other things (social media, video games, junk food, porn, etc). That trend is only increasing and is quite concerning.
I notice people talking about Youtube addiction, but nobody talking about the decrease in broadcast TV addiction.
Which is to say: To what extent are the new "addictions" actual increases in consumption, as opposed to trading off against a backdrop consumption level of a generalized passive entertainment?
(With maybe an asterisk on cell phones, which seem to at least some extent to be trading off against social activities, as opposed to passive entertainment)
That's a good point. I don't have explicit evidence to back this up, but it seems to me like people are using youtube (or just social media in general) more than they consumed tv in the past. I think we're essentially trading up in that way, where, yes, we stop using old mediums, but we use the new ones more because they are more addicting.
I was an RA in a lab working on the neurobiology of the mammalian reward/motivation system using medial forebrain bundle stimulation experiments as our model. This was two decades ago and the study of drug addiction was a major application of our work. My way of conceptualizing it was that "addiction" was undesired compulsive behavior that ultimately comes from that signaling pathway(s) and chemical substances that are addictive that work by either directly or indirectly creating axon potentials in the right areas. But all addictions are chemical at their root. Cocaine and gambling ultimately do similar things in brain when they become compulsive. The route is just slightly different.
One of my favorite party tricks is to walk up to the bowl of potato chips and announce to whoever is paying attention - "I just want one". Then I eat one potato chip and walk away.
I recommend Judson Brewers The craving mind.
Samsara = mortido = habit loops
Let's think of a person as a reinforcement learning agent with a particular reward function. Integrating a reward function over time with exponential time discount is mathematically equivalent to integrating the time derivative of the reward function with the same exponential time discount (up to constants). So, this can be just a mechanism to motivate the exact same behavior. The advantage of taking the derivate can be a better dynamic range (the derivative of the reward usually doesn't vary as much as the reward itself can vary). That is, it saves us the need to use more neurons to represent reward values.
You're absolutely right about food, I've noticed that exact phenomenon. I'm told things taste better to us when our bodies are more in need of the specific nutrients they contain; I noticed the truth of it in pregnancy (when I used to open the fridge and grab whatever appealed to me most, e.g. a spoonful of mustard, in order to stay ahead of cravings--that was a delicious spoonful of mustard, folks), and in a more muted way I notice it now. The first (little) handful of chocolate chips tastes amazing, further handfuls less so--so if I've had a good enough day to have the willpower, I stop after the first.
But movies are entirely different. A story is like sex: it has a climax, and the climax is the part people want, it feels good and it releases tension. The buildup to it makes it better; few people want it instantly b/c they know it won't be very good that way; but the climax is the part people want. The frustration of being interrupted is the frustration of not being able to complete the experience, not that of not being able to repeat or continue it.
Granted, I don't know how chemical addictions work, so I don't know what exactly the import of this distinction might be. But it certainly seems important to me.
That is a useful distinction. My intuition and personal experience tell me that addiction is much closer to the former.
It’s the constant itch you can’t scratch, I’ve never experienced it as an “incomplete experience.”
I have certainly experienced sex that way, but that’s never made me wake up and want to do it again.
…Well, that’s not true exactly, but it’s different. It’s not like that constant craving one experiences in addiction IME
part of it goes to the muff texture thing that was mentioned earlier. Addiction is a very narrow focus of attention on one specific desire and one who suffers from it is willing to endure a lot of seemingly miserable things in order to accomplish that, up to and including having their teeth filled with crumbs..
That description of heroin disagrees with my impression at least, as a multi-time recovered addict. I find that it is unpleasant the first time or two but once you get addicted it allows you this amazing ability instantly put your mind into exactly the state it is looking for. Outside of the physical addiction, it is that explicit control of state of mind which I think is most addicting to many people.
It was quite pleasant the very first time I tried it. I remember waking unusually early, feeling especially rested, climbing into the shower and thinking, (uh-oh) "What can I sell or steal to get some more of that?"
Recently I have watched a talk about addiction that complements this post. Talk is by Reinhold Bartl, head of the Milton Erickson Institute Innsbruck. He offers a hypno-systemic view on addiction as the loss of choice (der Verlust von Wahlmöglichkeiten). Addiction is a situation where a) someone enjoys a substance or an activity very much and b) is scathed for this by another person. Typically addiction is developed during adolescence where this conflict takes place between a kid and it's parent and is internalized in the further course of life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B73Kot6M3wU
unfortunately only in German, no subs available
Seems the criterion for 'enjoying' food is focussed on taste. Isn't there an opposing force that stops one from eating 20 potato chips or 10 squares of chocolate, namely the "mouthfeel"?. I hate the feeling of my mouth being full of the residual debris of foodstuffs, especially chocolate or chip-dust. The moment I feel that coating start to accumulate, I'm done, which is usually after 1 square of chocolate or a handful of chips.
Is there a relationship between disgust-sensitivity and binge-eating? Can't tell if highly disgust-sensitive people are inherently resistant to binge-eating because of the mouthfeel effect; or if - conversely - binge eating is a shame-response to disgust for sensitive people.
"Everyone always says you should “eat mindfully”. I tried this once and it was weird. For example, I noticed that only the first few bites of a tasty food actually tasted good. After that I habituated and lost it. Not only that, but there was a brief period when I finished eating the food which was below hedonic baseline."
I really can't imagine having this experience with food.
> Instead, I think of addiction as what happens when you become hyper-aware of one particular facet of your normal motivation system.
This is a (the?) standard definition of addiction in the literature, right? "Hypersensitization of incentive-salience attribution" is what I recall from, e.g., The Mind of an Addicted Brain: Neural Sensitization of Wanting versus Liking, by Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, in Current Directions in Psychological Science , Jun., 1995, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jun., 1995), pp. 71-76
Not only can tolerance develop over the course of multiple uses of the same drug, but it also develops rapidly within a single use of a drug in a process called "tachyphylaxis". How long does Adderall IR last, experientially? About 5 hours. What's its elimination half-life? About 10 hours. So 10 hours after the dose you're no longer feeling the effects (or you're experiencing a rebound / "come down") and yet you're still at 50% of the peak plasma levels! AFAICT this is true for a lot of psychoactive drugs (though sometimes this happens due to protein binding).
Another relevant concept is "substance use disorder", which I assumed meant something along the lines of "has a serious tolerance to illegal drugs" but in fact means an individual is persisting in their drug use despite serious negative consequences in other areas of their life. Similarly for addiction, which is often used colloquially to mean "experiences negative effects without" but actually means "compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences".
So if I'm drinking a fairly consistent amount of coffee every day and would have trouble living my normal life without it, I'm dependent but not addicted. Similarly one might argue that many of the early examples in this article are more akin to temporary dependences than temporary addictions.
But the article settles on the right conception of addiction, IMO. You're not addicted when it's hard to stop; heck, it's hard to change any habit. You're addicted when you start to sacrifice the rest of your life in pursuit of one source of pleasure.
I've encountered many addictive things in my life, and the strongest was World of Warcraft. It doesn't just hit the pleasure button in your brain (which drugs can certainly do _much_ more effectively). It gives you goals, it makes it easy to become part of a community, and to take on an important role in that community. It rewards your work with permanent incremental progress. I recall being frustrated not only with having to go to class, but also by normal social interactions - hanging out with friends - that were previously the highlight of my week. A few more hours and I could gain a level; what could friends offer me that would compare?
This certainly sounds like addiction / substance use disorder to me, though the DSM probably doesn't consider World of Warcraft to be a substance.
I'm a little bit surprised that this should be a new thing - especially with Scott's background as a trained and practicing clinical psychiatrist. My own model of addiction is like this since decades: you do something which feels nice, this produces dopamine and you want to do it again. And again. And again. No need for external chemicals playing with your brain, just nearly a billion years of evolution of life on earth. Some chemicals can speed up the addiction process because they emulate chemicals of our inner reward system. People call these chemicals literally 'dope'. But they call activities which do the same 'dope' as well. I just remember a lot of skiers and snowboarders wearing clothes from an brand called 'dope' these days and totally can understand this. I'm totally addicted to skiing recently, spending a lot of money on that, gave it higher priority then family and work the past months. Same with playing computer games (not me but a kid), reading all day (kids), Smartphones (the whole family) and so forth.
So I'm buffled that all this should be a new thing. Maybe I had learned a general truth by myself which ist not yet common wisdom? Can't believe that...
I was baffled as well. Any action or even thought has an effect on our hormone household to some degree, drugs being more direct and thought and action patterns more indirect. But I suppose it's worth making some concepts resurface, though, even if it's made to sound like it's a new insight. At any rate, it could be of benefit to anyone that hasn't made the connection yet or needed reminding of that connection. That's why the "speculative epistemic status" disclaimer is a nice touch, clever.