Dr. David Eagleman

Addiction is all about brain plasticity.

You put a certain drug in your system and what your brain does is it upregulates the receptors for that drug, which is its way of saying, oh, I didn't know the world consisted of this stuff.

Good.

I'm going to prepare for this now and I expect more of it.

So then you give it more and it says, great, I'm going to upregulate the receptors again.

And it comes to expect that this is in the world.

And then if you stop, you have these awful drug withdrawal symptoms precisely because you've changed your system.

Now it's expecting the world to have that.

So I draw an analogy between that and heartbreak.

Because when somebody that you love, let's say, dies or leaves town or whatever the thing is...

Your brain has come to expect the presence of that person in your world, has thought, okay, the world consists of this, and now that person is gone.

And heartbreak is a really painful physiological thing that you have to go through as your brain readjusts to the world without that person.

I don't know how I feel about this.

I wonder, when we were growing up, people said, oh, it's the television, it's the television's ruining everyone's attention span.

Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

And younger people might not know the television is called the boob tube where a boob was like an idiot.

And that was the idea.

That's where the term YouTube, you know, was a funny derivation of that.

But the right.