TJ Power

In that scenario there where I was talking about tidying your home, or you can think about this with anything, the hunting, the building, the making the fires, what's happening in your brain is your brain is putting in effort.

So your factory starts to generate dopamine because it's thinking, oh, okay, this human's putting in effort.

It's going to need its motivational chemical.

And occasionally it will ship these dopamine vesicles, these bubbles towards the reward center in order to create a feeling of satisfaction whilst we're in the pursuit of the goal.

So as you were building the shelter, you'd be like, oh, it's looking pretty good.

This is looking pretty safe.

And you get little hits of dopamine, just like going towards the reward center.

And during the effort, the factory would be replenishing.

We'd get a nice bit of reward in the reward center.

Great.

In the phone, when we open the phone, there's obviously no effort involved to experience the pleasure in our brain.

Once you start scrolling one of those short video feeds, you're experiencing deep experiences of pleasure with no effort.

So what happens is the factory starts mass shipping the bubbles towards the reward center going, oh, nice.

This is really good.

This is really good.

After a period of time, if you look back at the factory, there's not been anyone working on generating more dopamine.

So suddenly the factory gets very low in that resource.

And when we're in that kind of apathetic state, we can't concentrate, we can't be bothered to do anything, we're at our computer and we're just clicking around on loads of different things and not really actually doing the hard tasks that we know we need to do.

That's because this factory is very low in this chemical.

The phone is the sole source of reducing the quantity of dopamine within there.