How rats stopped being addicts

I heard yesterday a brilliant short story at the digital addiction symposium in London.

You might have heard about experiments with rats, when scientists localized their pleasure centre, and connected them with electrodes to a button. Rats kept pushing the buttons, drugging themselves with dopamine to death and forgetting to eat or do something else.

We sometimes do this with our devices, too, don’t we? Keep obsessively checking for likes, or newsfeeds, or emails, although we know there isn’t anything new there compared to 5 minutes ago.

However, there is another part to this story. It turns out, rats in the experiment were living in the impoverished environment, without any other stimuli. They were given no ‘tools’ to change their environment. However, the moment scientists gave them an opportunity to actually build their environment themselves, guess what happened… rats stopped drugging themselves, and started building their world.

By living in an environment where we have no control over doing or changing things, like doing meaningless jobs, even well-paid, or spending long hours chained to screens without a choice, we start behaving like these rats. We want to go online again and again, and press buttons to get some dopamine, happiness, pleasure.

But when we start actively building our own environment, changing it, when we feel in control of what we do, how we make a difference, all of a sudden we stop being obsessed by our devices.

Did it happen to you to disengage with your device, because other things were more important and appealing? Let me know in comments!

PS I am crowdfunding for Homo Distractus, a book about how we have outsourced our lives to tech and allowed it to manipulate us. It's not about digital detox. It's about how we can manage tech, and not allow it to manage us.

We're 82% funded, and there are 10 days to go. Get yourself a book copy here.