The Way We Scroll Social Media Is Like A Sick Dog - Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman

just how triggering are our phones when it comes to dopamine okay great question we often hear that you know the social media getting dopamine hit after dopamine hit when we first get on social media after a walk for the first time or after a long period of time the amount of dopamine that's released we think is quite substantial it's novel remember dopamine is about novelty surprise and the sense that we are on some exciting track that's what dopamine is really about it puts us into states of readiness anticipation looking seeking etc almost always for things

outside the confines of our skin just to contrast it maybe for a bit more of a future discussion serotonin does the opposite when there's a lot of serotonin in our brain and body typically it makes us feel satisfied stated more quiescent comfortable with what we have in our own immediate sphere and within us right the comfort of a good meal the food you have dopamine is about go go go if you look at somebody who's high on cocaine or methamphetamine it's all about pursuit because that's a very dopaminergic drug you look at somebody who's taken

a drug and i'm not suggesting people do this but it really ramps up serotonin let's say a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor prozag zoloft etc the side effects of those drugs if the dosages are too high lack of appetite lack of libido kind of meh about life you know then so they'll adjust the dose down that's because those are serotonergic drugs so in in general we are in pursuit of things dopamine is is quite high so now you have to remind me your question because i've set up the dopamine serotonin cell phones yes um forgive me

so the thing about cell phones is when you first get on there and you haven't let's say you're no wi-fi on the flight or something and you land it can actually be quite stimulating you get a lot of dope i mean oh there's this oh there's that but very quickly when you're scrolling on social media you're no longer getting the novelty but you're continuing to do it you almost don't know why you're doing it at that point it shifts over to something that's a bit more like an obsessive compulsive behavior where that we can define

an obsessive-compulsive behavior where the obsession leads to a compulsion so the obsession is a thought the compulsion is a behavior but the acting out of the compulsion merely serves to increase the obsession right this is very different than being obsessed with food or obsessed with cleanliness there's no payoff right exactly there's no anxiety relief by carrying out the compulsion with ocd behaviors like scrolling social media the dopamine quickly wanes and then you find that you're just sort of and we've all been there you're scrolling like why am i doing this this isn't that interesting that

is this isn't that interesting now the algorithms for social media are very clever and i don't want to demonize it i you know provide a lot of a lot of my life is spent on you know on social media now but in the algorithms that they've incorporated function on the the most powerful way to keep people doing a behavior or an animal for that matter is intermittent random reward a random intermittent reward that you don't know when you're going to hit the jackpot so you're scrolling you're scrolling and then you see something typically it's very

high what you know in nerd speak we'd say signal to noise so if you're reading some interesting things this came out in the news this came out and then it's all of a sudden a riot or a person that is jumped base jumping off a building or um you know for people that are are scrolling looking at bodies or something like that live bodies so hopefully people aren't looking at the dead bodies but look if something's very tragic then that has this gravitational pull and then you what happens is you start getting the system working

for that next dopamine hit that you don't know when it's going to come it's just like gambling so i look at social media as initially being very dopaminergic driving reward surprise and excitement but very quickly transitioning to something more like ocd and the kinds of behaviors where it looks if you if we were to look at ourselves through the lens of an experiment like we would an animal experiment we think that animal is sick if you saw an animal digging in the corner looking looking looking looking for a bone the dog is looking looking looking

looking looking looking looking looking you'd think that's really sad that's us what's happening people if you enjoyed that then press here for the full unedited episode and don't forget to subscribe peace you