Читать книгу Overcoming Internet Addiction For Dummies - David N. Greenfield - Страница 41

So, what does all this talk of evolution earlier in this chapter have to do with addiction, anyway? Well, the brain’s ability to use dopamine to ensure certain survival behaviors can also be stimulated by other pleasurable behaviors. It seems that drugs, alcohol, sex, food, gambling, the Internet, pornography, video gaming, and even social media all elevate our dopamine levels. Addiction is in part related to becoming habitually dependent on this elevation of dopamine; this, along with various psychological, social, and behavioral factors, produces the experience we classify as addiction. What we get addicted to is the dopamine and, even more so, the anticipation of that dopamine; this, along with other brain chemicals, hormones, and behaviors, essentially hijacks the reward circuits in the brain that are meant to increase our survivability. This means that to the brain, addiction is a misguided piggybacking of survival drives.

This piggybacking of the reward neuropathways leads to a common misunderstanding about the biology of addiction because we often wrongfully assume that we get addicted to a substance. However, that does not account for behavioral (process) addictions, within which Internet and video game addictions would fall. This is also true for some of the other behavioral addictions, including sex, food, and gambling. The brain, when excited by a video game, doesn’t look much different from the brain ingesting cocaine, eating a great meal, or having sex (although there may be differences in the overall level of dopamine innervation). These differences are relevant, of course, and dopamine is involved in all these behaviors and is linked to our survival, as I explain earlier in this chapter.

The following sections go into more detail on how the brain is susceptible to addiction.