How your phone hooks you: dopamine, infinite scroll and the slot machine in your pocket
Dopamine: why you keep scrolling when you are not even enjoying it
You scroll for an hour and laugh twice, and still your thumb wants one more. Dopamine is often called the pleasure chemical. So why do rats with almost no dopamine still enjoy sugar?
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At 11 at night, you open a joke app "for one minute". At ten past midnight, you are still scrolling. In all that time, you laughed twice.
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Most of the jokes were not funny, and you knew it. Your thumb kept going anyway. So the wanting and the enjoying came apart. Scientists found that this split is built into the brain.
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In the 1980s, the scientist Kent Berridge studied rats tasting sugar. A rat that likes a taste licks its lips, much as a baby does. So its face shows how much it likes it.
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Then he studied rats whose brains had almost no dopamine left. They stopped eating on their own, even with food right beside them. But when sugar was put in their mouths, they still licked their lips. They still liked it. They no longer wanted it.
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Years later, his team tested mice with extra dopamine. They ran faster to a sweet treat. But their faces showed they liked it no more than other mice did.
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So scientists think dopamine is not really the pleasure chemical. It drives wanting: the pull toward something. Liking comes from other parts of the brain. Most days the two go up together, but they can come apart.
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That was you at midnight: a lot of wanting, very little liking. So a feed does not need you to enjoy it. It only needs to keep the wanting going, and the app on your phone has a trick for that.
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Go further
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