There’s probably never been such a large population of addicts before. With our phones, tablets, and social media, we can’t look away for more than a few minutes at a time without feeling antsy. No meal is worth eating without an Instagram or Facebook snap, and couples text each other from different rooms in the same house, sending their messages up to satellites, around the world and back, just to travel a few yards.
What’s wrong with us? Well, according to former Google product manager Tristan Harris, this didn’t just happen — programmers have been deliberately playing with the way our brains operate to turn us into addicts for some time. He calls it “race to the bottom of the brain stem.”Talking to Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes, Harris explains that it’s sometimes called “brain hacking.” It’s the dirty little secret of the tech world. If you remember those old stories about movie theaters inserting a few frames of a delicious-loooking iced beverage into a movie to subliminally make you crave a drink from their concession stand, you’ll understand that it’s just a new wrinkle on an old idea: Making customers want a product. But this seems to work, and its effect has been insidious and widespread, with consequences that go beyond selling products, to the way we interact with each other, ideas, and the world.
The name of programmer Ramsay Brown’s startup says it all: Dopamine Labs. The company, which does programming for fitness and financial companies, is all about producing code that triggers a neurological response in its audience’s brains. Brown tells 60 Minutes, “A computer programmer who now understands how the brain works knows how to write code that will get the brain to do certain things.
” The idea is to cause a rush of dopamine in the brain’s reward center that you basically can’t help but want to experience again and again.
Harris says your phone is a slot machine that you can’t stop playing: “Well every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see, ‘What did I get?’” So, sometimes you win, sometimes not, but you have to keep playing.
So what’s a win in this world? How about Likes on Facebook or Instagram? Part of the trick is to optimize software to deliver these meaningless rewards in a way that gives them maximum feel-good impact. Ever notice that they arrive in clumps? Says Brown, “They’re…
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