Why We All Have 'Internet-Addiction Genes' - Robert Wright - The Atlantic - 0 views
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: A gene that seems to be (very modestly) correlated with internet addiction also plays a role in nicotine addiction.
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A gene that seems to be (very modestly) correlated with internet addiction also plays a role in nicotine addiction.
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internet addiction is not a figment of our imagination
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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.
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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.
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Human beings are biochemical machines "designed" by natural selection to, among other things, form habits.
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The habit-forming machinery involves the release of reward chemicals, such as dopamine, that make us feel good upon attaining these goals
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In the modern world, there are shortcuts to getting these rewards
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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
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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.
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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
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After all, the internet, like these chemicals, allows us to trigger our neuronal reward mechanisms with much less work,
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it wasn't possible, in a very small and technologically primitive social universe, to at any time of day launch an observation or joke
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the internet, like a pack of cigarettes or lots of cocaine, lets you just sit in a room and repeatedly trigger reward chemicals that
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And all of us have lots and lots of these genes--genes that make us susceptible to internet addiction.
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some of these genes may vary from person to person in ways that make some people particularly susceptible to internet addiction
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In fact, there will turn out to be so many genes which are so modestly correlated with internet addiction
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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.
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These genes are really just genes for being human.
