Name: How We Chase Dopamine: Porn, Social Media, and Alcohol | Steven Kotler
Uploaded: 2018-04-06T01:13:54.000Z
Duration: 3 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

Peter Drucker famously said if I want to know what you believe I could ask you what you

believe and maybe I'll believe your answer.

Adverbs of degree

But show me your calendar and your bank statement and then I'll really know what's going

And what we tried to calculate was the altered state economy.

How much time and money do people spend trying to change the channel on normal waking consciousness

and unlock these heightened states of information.

We looked everywhere from elicit to licit drugs which is an obvious place to start but

we also looked at things like pornography and social media where the neurochemical reward

you're getting from these experiences is very similar to the neurochemical reward you're

At the heart of a lot of this is the chemical dopamine.

It's a performance enhancing drug and it's a pleasure drug.

It is also incredibly, incredibly, incredibly addictive.

Porn addiction is very much about dopamine, right.

If you think about porn from an evolutionary point of view our sex drive is about procreation.

We're not watching porn for what it makes us feel sexually.

We're watching porn for what it does to us mentally.

It gets us high and it's the dopamine that is getting us high.

It's knocking outside of normal waking consciousness and it's lifting us up to a heightened state.

Unfortunately porn on demand tends to be very, very addictive and people get into a downstream

We see the same thing with social media, right.

Simon Sinek famously says if you wake up in the morning and you're checking your phone

before you're saying hello to your spouse that's an addictive behavior.

And it's dopamine that is driving that addiction.

So what happens with social media is Robert Sapolsky who did the foundational research

on this at Stanford calls it the magic of maybe.

When you look at your phone and maybe there's a text there and maybe there's not and you

When it shows up that high you get, that's dopamine.

When it shows up you get a 400 percent spike in dopamine.

That is roughly the same amount of dopamine as you're getting from cocaine.

It's slightly less than an extremely addictive drug like cocaine.

And it's interesting because if you think about things that routinely produce a lot

Alcohol releases a whole lot of dopamine.

We say okay, you can have that but you've got to wait.

We don't do that with online pornography.

We might want to do it with online pornography.

We're essentially putting highly addictive drugs into the hands of kids before they have

And what you're seeing with internet addiction, with social media addiction, with porn addiction

It's people trying to change their state of consciousness with a device.

Trying to get at the underlying neurochemistry and it's very, very addictive.