Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the hit television show Ozark, a bright financial advisor finds himself suddenly working on the wrong side of the law.
What's our story for the kids? Well, we could tell them the truth, Wendy. How would that be?
Following a series of bad decisions by his business partner, Marty Bird, played by Jason Bateman, begins working for a drug cartel.
I want you to be ready to set up shop within a week. Yeah. And Marty, when I drive by your house, there better be a for sale sign on your lawn.
Almost from the start, the bodies start to fall. People get thrown off balconies. People get shot. People are electrocuted. When government officials get involved, more violence unfolds. People betray one another. They cheat each other. They act in selfish and short-sighted ways.
Let me just jog your memory for a minute. There was an innocent man who was murdered. Gary.
You might say this is the genre of the drug movie or television show. You see it in critically acclaimed TV shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad and in movies such as Traffic and Scarface.
Say hello to my little friend. You want to play with us? Okay.
Running through these dramas, we sense the irresistible power of drug addiction, the implacable draw of heroin or cocaine or methamphetamine, the chaos and crime that follow everywhere the drug trade is plied. I've watched many of these TV shows and movies as entertainment. For many years, I also reported on the work of researchers who study the science of drug addiction.
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Chapter 2: How does Anna Lembke redefine our understanding of addiction?
It was really weird.
So the Twilight books eventually spawned a very popular series of films. I want to play you a clip from one of those movies. A teenage girl named Bella is confronting a boy she knows, Edward, about his true nature.
I know what you are. Say it. Out loud. Say it. Vampire. Are you afraid?
No. Okay, so there are a lot of, you know, breathless pauses here, but I'm hearing, you know, fantasy, paranormal stuff, but it sounds like an innocent enough pastime, Anna.
Oh, an innocent enough pastime? Sure. It always starts out innocent. And of course, you know, it was, but what happened was it changed the way I felt in the moment and in a way that resonated so deeply that I wanted to keep recreating that feeling. And what was that feeling? It was essentially a feeling of non-being.
While I was reading the Twilight Saga, it just transported me to another time and place such that I completely forgot myself. And that self-forgetting was clearly something that I needed and wanted. You know, I read the whole saga. I think it's like four books. And then I wanted to recreate that feeling again. So I read the whole saga again. Wow.
Pleasurable, but not as pleasurable as the first time around. But by then I was completely tapped into this whole genre of vampire romance novels. And so I started to invest larger and larger amounts of time, energy, and creativity into obtaining and reading vampire romance novels. You know, seemingly innocent to start with, but it became a bit of an obsession.
And when I ran out of vampire romance novels, I moved on to werewolf romance novels, and then there was necromancers and soothsayers and all kinds of paranormal romance novels. Where were you procuring these books? So I live right next to a little library, which has a limited collection.
So when I went through the limited collection at my local library, I either biked over to the main library or you can order through the interlibrary loan. And, you know, some of these romance novels have very revealing covers. Like it was some bodice ripper with some hunk on the cover, you know, at the prow of a ship or something. Like I wouldn't want to be seen reading that anywhere.
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Chapter 3: What are the common patterns of addiction in modern society?
And when I think about why on earth is American Idol so entrancing for me, well, they've figured it out, right? They've taken music, which is already reinforcing for most people's brains, releases dopamine, feels good. And then they've combined that with gaming and they've turned it into a competition and thereby really made a very potent drug.
Can you talk a moment about the factor that's known as novelty? This is true in drugs of abuse, but it's also true for many of the other things that previously we might not have thought as being problematic.
Yeah, so dopamine is extremely sensitive to novelty, which is why, for example, people can get addicted to things like the news. That's the definition of news. It's new stuff coming your way.
But what's become so toxic about the modern world is that in order to maintain customers and keep them coming back, you've got to take the thing that they liked before and then package it as slightly new or different or better. And the internet has absolutely mastered that, right?
These AI algorithms learn us, figure out where we've spent time before, what we've liked before, and then proffer or suggest to us things that are similar but a little bit different. And that absolutely engages this treasure-seeking function where we keep going because we're hoping that the next hit will be something that's just a little bit better but similar to what we had before.
You know, I remember when I was in eighth grade or maybe seventh grade, Anna, teachers would tell me to avoid a local park, me and all of my classmates, because the rumor was that drugs were being bought and sold and used at this park.
But, you know, if everything can be drugified, if addictions can be beamed and streamed and, you know, Wi-Fi'd into our living rooms and bedrooms, it becomes really now very hard to put a fence around it and say, avoid going to this park because the problem is no longer just with one park.
That's the problem we're all facing as individuals, as parents, as schools. I mean, I don't know about you, but when I walk around and see the way that people are just glued to their phones, it just makes me really sad. And yet I totally get it. I mean, these things are, they're literally mesmerizing. We are put in a trance by these devices.
They're highly reinforcing for our very fragile little human brains.
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