David N. Greenfield - Overcoming Internet Addiction For Dummies

The disinhibition you feel when communicating online can also impact your perception of intimacy; we found that when users communicate online, they can feel more connected and intimate with those they communicate with. However, this level of intimacy does not seem to reflect the same types of intimacy that occur through other modes of communication and connection. Although online communication is useful for work and social connection, it can lack some of the cues, boundaries, depth, nuance, and markers that allow real-time connection to establish deeper aspects of relatedness. The ironic fact is that people often feel more intimate more rapidly online, even though it is questionable whether this is analogous to real-time social connection. I have many patients who reported feeling almost instant closeness online only to find it didn’t cross over well in person.

Unfortunately, because everything online is vulnerable to hacking, there is a risk that sensitive information such as finances or other personal data can be hacked into, stolen, ransomed, or corrupted. Nothing is fully safe and secure online, and care must be taken to protect sensitive and private information, including, but not limited to, financial data.

The openness and easy accessibility of the Internet, along with the proliferation of social media, have created a firestorm of problems with cyberstalking and cyberbullying, as it is easy to troll someone online and track their digital and social footprint. Even more damaging, however, is the ease and relative frequency with which cyberbullying can occur. When someone says something about someone online, it’s difficult to erase the sting and stain of what is said. Perhaps the worst part is that a powerful feature of the Internet is its broadcast capability — and this makes cyberstalking and cyberbullying that much easier. Anyone can say anything online, and short of overt hate speech, and sometimes including it, it’s easy to get away with saying some psychologically damaging things about someone. This is an all-too-common occurrence for children, tweens, and teens, and there have been numerous cases where significant emotional damage was done and that, in some cases, resulted in suicides.

The Internet is powerful and can be used to communicate with others, but care must be taken to remember that everything said online is amplified and potentially broadcast to the world.

Chapter 2

IN THIS CHAPTER

Finding out how addiction is linked to evolutionary survival

Discovering how the brain is susceptible to addiction

Checking out the parts of the brain involved in addiction

Addiction can produce numerous negative psychological and behavioral effects. A large part of the addiction process is directly connected to the neurobiology of the brain — the topic of this chapter.

The biological factors relating to addiction are primarily associated with the limbic system of the brain. The limbic area is found in the middle of the brain, and it sits on top of the brain stem and lower brain structures (sometimes called the old or reptilian brain) and just under the neocortex (the wrinkled, gray part of the brain — the one you think of when you picture a human brain). Neo refers to the newer section of the brain (newer in the sense that it was the last to develop in our evolution).

The limbic part of the brain is much older than the neocortex. Its development is often associated with emotion and more primitive survival functions, and it’s sometimes referred to as the mammalian brain. It has a long evolutionary history, having evolved over millions of years in mammals, far predating human evolution. Much of the limbic system’s job involves supporting various essential activities that developed to ensure species survival. By comparison, the neocortex is probably only about 200,000 years old, and as such, it’s a relatively new arrival on the block when it comes to brain development.

So, what does the limbic area of the brain have to do with addiction? The answer is plenty, and it makes a lot of sense when looking at the relative utility of all biological structures and functions throughout the history of our species and understanding that nothing occurs by accident. This all becomes clear when you examine these functions throughout our evolutionary development; the following sections walk you through the brain’s evolution when it comes to addiction.

Many brain structures involved in our survival have to do with pleasure, such as the ventral tegmental area, substantia nigra, amygdala, anterior cingulate, prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and nucleus accumbens ( Chapter 3has more details). However, the nucleus accumbens (NA), located in the brain’s limbic system, is the major source of the experience of pleasure.

The nucleus accumbens is a dense collection of cells that are specifically receptive to dopamine. Dopamine is one of the major excitatory neurotransmitters responsible for pleasure and movement. So, why would our survival be linked to an excitatory pleasure neurotransmitter? Well, as nature would have it, a mammal’s survival is at least minimally based on the ability to engage in two behaviors on a predictable, consistent, and efficient basis. In other words, nature essentially needs a strong guarantee (from a genetic survival perspective) that can increase the odds of survival. These two behaviors (not surprisingly) are sustenance (eating, and all the behaviors associated with obtaining and consuming nutrition) and procreation (mating). Obviously, adequate nutrition is necessary for effective procreation as well.

The interesting thing here is that food — or more specifically, eating — is highly pleasurable. A strong biological pleasure drive (not just hunger) is linked to consuming food, and this is nature’s way of ensuring that food is consumed. So, when we eat, we experience an associated strong elevation of post-synaptic dopamine in the nucleus accumbens; this flood of dopamine is experienced as pleasure. Just think about your last great meal or the intensity of pleasure your dog seems to experience when eating. Food is extremely pleasurable and satisfying to consume for all mammals. Even without language or consciousness to understand this connection, on a strictly biological level, this pleasure increases the likelihood of a behavior being repeated reliably and consistently — thus ensuring survival.

The same applies to procreation and sex. Obviously, it would make sense to make procreation pleasurable on some level. Not just humans, but all mammals have dopamine linked to their mating behavior. This is nature’s hedge to increase the odds of fulfilling the biological imperative — to get genes transferred into the next generation. This is the basic survival instinct that accounts for at least part of human behavior — the circle of life, if you will.