Contrary to the archetypal portrayance of addiction; which usually connotes ingestion, snorting, or the injection of some foreign substance, usually contraband. Addiction as defined by the merriam webster dictionary is actually just a compulsive need to indulge in a habit forming activity, characterized by physiological symptoms upon withdrawal.
If you are here, then you are no stranger to the unsubsiding wave of dopamine addiction that social media helped to stir up. That tickle that comes with every like, love, and retweet that instagram, snapchat, facebook and all the other harbingers of this "egregious" act offered us, i know what you are thinking now, and Yes Steemit too.
For those who might not know. Dopamine is a chemical neurotransmitter, located in our central nervous system and responsible for the regulation of emotions. It is the drug you buy in "INSTAnt-GRAM"(subject of my soon to be published consipracy theory post :) quantities.
Okay, lets get serious.
There are a tonne of material out there used by both proponents and antagonists to support their assertions on the effects of online media on our behavior.
HOW DOPAMINE REALLY WORKS
A clinical psychologist in his bid to disambiguate the misconstrued public notion of how dopamine works, carried out a research suppressing dopamine levels in his subjects (rats in this case-can our animal activists please stand up). The result was a normal hedonic response to the pleasure trigger activity. In another experiment, the dopamine levels were observed during the first and subsequent administration of heroine to the rat. During the first attempt, it was observed that there was no release of dopamine as the rat was clueless as to what was about to happen. However, subsequent doses were accompanied by significant release of the chemical which was immediately suppressed after the intake.
CONCLUSION
There exist several neurotransmitters in our system and dopamine is just one of the more popular ones. There are also a set of very complex interactions responsible for the euphoria we feel. Dopamine actually acts like a traffic warden to our brian, telling it to anticipate a pleasurable event, as a consequence making it more sensitive to the most faint signals of good feeling.
I guess these platforms are not so egregious afterall, and a better grasp of our actions from a neuroscientific purview should help us assert more control in our pursuit of steem fame.
If we must surf the wave of steem its disruption of social media addiction, we should at least know what we are doing and not drown in this unforgiving ocean.
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