When I was in high school I never liked team sports, but the magical word “technology” would fill me with glee. Everything from the cast-off mini-computer at school that read programs from punched tape to the space shuttle provided me with a constant source of excitement. In 1973 my parents spoiled me rotten with one of the first electronic calculators on the market. I was enraptured by those green LED numbers, and would repeatedly perform calculations, merely for the thrill of knowing I had a thinking machine in my hands. Even the smell of it was hypnotic. I purchased my first liquid-crystal digital watch in 1975 with proceeds from my paper route. It was amazing! An electrical device that kept quartz-crystal time and communicated with me using seven cell LCD numbers. I even discovered I could find lost objects at night in the park using the back light! My number one thrill though was derived from the twice-yearly airshows at Biggin Hill Battle of Britain airfield. The bigger, faster and louder the plane the better, unless it was a hovering jump-jet, in which case the fact it wasn’t moving was mindboggling.
It sounds trivial, but one of the worst days of my life was when the Sunday School Prize giving fell on the same day as the Biggin Hill Airshow. I was 11 years old and was carted off to church where I could still hear the planes but couldn’t see them. There was definitely some serious dopamine withdrawal involved in that experience. In today’s technology environment, however, kids are vulnerable to that kind of misery on a daily basis. At 14 years old my daughter went through a difficult time with stress and depression at school. We took her to see a psychiatric nurse who informed us that most of the teenagers he sees are brought to him because their parents take away their smart phones and they threaten to kill themselves as a result! This is an order of magnitude worse than my airshow experience because their social identity is bound up so tightly with the device and the applications it provides. A smart phone is not just and pretty and powerful status symbol, but also allows them to meet their esteem and social connection needs in so many ways.
While kids in my day might be content with collecting stamps they now collect Snapchat Streaks (sequences of daily communications with their friends). While we might have hung out with our friends at the park this can now done remotely using Instagram Hangouts. While these activities might be dopamine inducing, the opportunities for dopamine withdrawal are also manifold. Kids experience the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) because they can see posts and pictures from their friends at events that they are unable to attend, or worse are not invited to. They can be bullied 24 hours a day. They may be getting ready for bed when an entire online friend-drama unfolds after 11pm causing them to lose hours of sleep. If the parents take away their phone they will take some other device (an old phone belonging to a parent, a tablet or a laptop computer). If all the devices are locked up overnight in a safe they will secretly borrow a phone from a friend. They might even commandeer a device left at their house without telling the owner. These are the behaviours of an addict.
Data plans can be turned off. Wifi network access can be put on a schedule. Apps like Netsanity can be installed on their phone so that their parents can see and control what the child is doing online, but kids are sneaky. They learn how to turn off the management software, or find locations nearby with free wifi, or steal passwords for private devices. None of this makes the job of parenting particularly easy. It does, however, show how important relationships and connection are to the limbic system.
It’s not like the problem is limited to kids either. Some parents also spend hours a day on their devices, playing games, reading and browsing social media. This in turn presents a poor example to the children and disrupts communication and connection within the family. Even before the smart phone came into vogue the Blackberry Curve had earned the nickname “Crackberry” because its use was so addictive. I won’t delve too deeply into why this might be the case other than by making the dopamine connection. I do want to note, however, the amount of time these things take away from the meaningful/valuable aspects of life.
While the principle of technology-based reward might be viewed by the public as incidental to the design of mobile applications, that’s only because the industry has been cagey about its strategies and goals. Make no mistake, the software industry is well aware of the link between dopamine-mediated reward and application design, and, predictably, the motivation behind this strategy is money. This approach has given rise to a new job designation – the neuro-economist – and has spawned a number of companies and departmental specialties that seek to maximize the addictive nature of products.
A key example of this is the Silicon Valley startup Dopamine Labs, the brainchild of neuro-economist Dalton Combs and neuro-scientist Ramsay Brown. A major feature of their approach to software design is maintaining the fast-pace of rewarding actions. This utilizes a feature of the addiction process that has been observed consistently in the abuse of chemical agents, namely, the faster the delivery mechanism, and the more frequent the administration is, the more potent the dependency becomes. This has been shown repeatedly in comparisons of the relative effects of smoking, injecting, insufflating (snorting) and ingesting drugs. Over the past few years it has become obvious that technology addiction is a problem. Nowhere is this stated more clearly than in an interview with former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya where he stated:
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works: no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem. This is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem.”
To give them credit, Combs and Brown took this to heart when designing the Mindfulness app “Space”. Space introduces delays in the app browsing experience aimed at breaking the dependency on the fast-paced dopamine feedback process. When initially released, Apple saw the effect this app would have on their bottom line and refused to make it available on their app store. This decision has since been reversed, presumably because while Apple’s number one goal is maximizing profits for their shareholders, they do have a conscience.
How does space work. As reported in Psychology Today, mindfulness (the practice of conscious awareness of an individual’s own inner thoughts and sensory states) activates the medial pre-frontal cortex. Through the process of neuro-plasticity, mindfulness practice results in the growth of brain areas associated with self-awareness, empathy, compassion and reason. However, as with growing plants this growth takes place very slowly. While a few seconds of delay might help to loosen the grip a rewarding experience has on the psyche, making long-lasting changes to the balance of power between the limbic and pre-frontal brains takes dedication, effort and commitment. These are not something that we, as humans, have in large supply.
While using smart phone applications might be addictive, creating them is no less so. I’m currently writing an app that uses the Global Positioning System to track the performance of students during driving examinations. The dopaminergic effects of this task are palpable. I’ve taken to getting up an hour early just so that I can go to work and get the dopamine hit provided by the process. I haven’t had to set a wake-up alarm in weeks because the dopamine stimulation wakes me up hours before I would normally get up. It’s like being on a stimulant drug.
One area that is ripe for further research is the effect this principle has on the economy. Companies used to pay thousands of dollars to purchase a single enterprise application license. Now a large part of our economy runs on open-source operating systems, databases, geospatial and cloud systems that are available free of charge. Where does the money go that used to be spent on software infrastructure? These savings can’t but effect the economy as a whole. But wait, you may ask, how can these products be free of charge when huge teams of people have spent thousands of hours developing them? The answer is that programmers are willing to donate their time and energy towards the production of these applications because they enjoy it. Their payment is no longer measured in financial terms but rather in the strength of the dopamine response experienced during the team engagement and coding process. This field of study is now known as Open Source Economics. (These points are consistent with my thoughts expressed in chapter ? “Dopamine and Money”.)