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Whether heavy internet use deserves to be called an addiction or just a hard-to-break habit is a question about a behavior pattern and its attendant psychological states.

To answer it we ask such things as how strong the cravings for the internet are, what lengths a person will go to in order to satisfy them, and so on.

Human beings are biochemical machines "designed" by natural selection to, among other things, form habits.

The habit-forming machinery involves the release of reward chemicals, such as dopamine, that make us feel good upon attaining these goals

In the modern world, there are shortcuts to getting these rewards

And there's some evidence (though here I'm approaching the limits of my comprehension of the science) that people with a particular variant of a gene involved in building acetylcholine receptors are more susceptible to nicotine addiction than other people

the main point is this: the biochemical mechanisms (including genes) involved in chemical addictions will naturally be the mechanisms involved in habit formation more generally since habit formation is what they were originally designed for.

whether it's a habit or an addiction, it is going to involve pleasure-dispensing biochemical mechanisms of the sort that can get us addicted to such chemicals as nicotine and cocaine

After all, the internet, like these chemicals, allows us to trigger our neuronal reward mechanisms with much less work,

it wasn't possible, in a very small and technologically primitive social universe, to at any time of day launch an observation or joke

the internet, like a pack of cigarettes or lots of cocaine, lets you just sit in a room and repeatedly trigger reward chemicals that

And all of us have lots and lots of these genes--genes that make us susceptible to internet addiction.

some of these genes may vary from person to person in ways that make some people particularly susceptible to internet addiction

In fact, there will turn out to be so many genes which are so modestly correlated with internet addiction

that if journalists write stories every time such a gene is found, or is thought to have been found, they will find that they're not shedding much actual light on the situation.

These genes are really just genes for being human.