Here is the full transcript of Cyrus McCandless’ talk titled “Misunderstanding Dopamine: Why The Language of Addiction Matters” at TEDxPortsmouth conference.
In this TEDx talk, Cyrus McCandless delves into the common misconceptions surrounding addiction and the misuse of the term in relation to consumer behaviors and products. He highlights his extensive research background in neuroscience, focusing on consumer behavior, decision-making, motivation, and addiction.
McCandless argues that equating the compulsive use of technology and foods with drug addiction undermines the gravity of the drug crisis and hampers effective conversation and solution finding. He emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between the biological mechanisms of addiction and mere habits or preferences, particularly pointing out the misunderstood role of dopamine in pleasure and motivation.
Through elucidating dopamine’s actual function in learning and attention, he dissects how addiction to drugs differs fundamentally from attachments to items like smartphones or junk food. He stresses that addiction involves a complex biological process that can overpower the individual’s control and priorities, requiring a nuanced and informed approach to treatment. McCandless concludes by urging a reevaluation of how society discusses and addresses addiction, advocating for empathy and scientific understanding to combat the crisis effectively.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Understanding Addiction
As some of the neuroscientists, I’ve spent the last 11 years studying normal consumer behavior and decision-making. But before that, I spent even more years studying motivation and addiction in the lab.
And I believe that if we have any chance of solving our current drug crisis, that marketers, app developers, and most of all journalists need to stop using the word “addiction” when they’re talking about iPhones, Candy Crush Saga, or cheeseburgers. If our only problems were too much junk food or apps that took up too much of our attention, then our misunderstanding of addiction wouldn’t be a big deal.
But we’ve got a really serious problem to deal with right now, and I worry that by misunderstanding addiction, we’re missing our chance to have productive conversations and to find solutions that really work. We’ve lost tens of thousands of lives to drug addiction last year, and it’s getting worse. But we continue to take the same aggressively punitive approach to drug enforcement under the presumption that if we’re just hard enough on addicts, they’ll stop. And we’ve severely limited the kinds of treatments that are available and the availability of those treatments.
And we’ve been very slow to adopt new approaches from the science of addiction, where we’ve made huge progress over the last 30 years. If our current approach worked, don’t you think things would be getting better instead of worse? Marketers and journalists have perpetuated a key misunderstanding that what feels like your addiction to your phone is the same thing as addiction, as real addiction to addictive drugs. And while it may feel like a compulsion to check your phone every couple of minutes, you’re still very much in control over that relationship.
The Misunderstanding of Dopamine
And I hope that if we all understand a little better the difference between these two kinds of relationships with substances, we’ll be in a better position to make some progress on this crisis. And this misunderstanding is related to a longstanding misunderstanding about dopamine. So, McDonald’s is probably where you learned about cheeseburgers for the first time as a child, right? It’s where you learned that you liked them, it’s where you learned that you wanted them, and it’s how you figured out how to get them.
How many people in the audience like cheeseburgers? How many people want a cheeseburger right now? And you might really want a cheeseburger right now, but are you motivated enough to stand up right now and go get one? Anybody leave the theater? No?
Okay. What you’re experiencing is called competitive reinforcement. Some goals are more important than others. We may like cheeseburgers and we may even want cheeseburgers, but it’s not important enough to you to get up right now and abandon what you’re doing to go get one.
But we need to breathe, and most of us feel like we need to find our kids if we don’t know where they are. So we have priorities. We all tend to think that we want things because we like them. But if you really think about that for a minute, you’ll find a lot of situations where that doesn’t strictly apply.
The Role of Dopamine in Addiction
So you might want a cheeseburger right now, and you might think that you want a cheeseburger because you like cheeseburgers. And it’s mostly harmless to think that you want cheeseburgers just because you like cheeseburgers. Scientists also used to think that we like things because we want them, or we want things because we like them. It seemed obvious.
But recently, we figured out that the brain processes liking things and wanting things in different ways. They’re not equal. And I want to focus on motivation. So it turns out that dopamine is not the feel-good chemical that we thought it was. Dopamine does not make us feel good, and it doesn’t tell us how much we like things. Dopamine teaches us how and where to get the things that we need, or just the things that we like. And it does this in a deceptively simple way. Dopamine makes us pay attention to things that are important, put our energy into the things that are most important, and let less important things wait.
And to do this, it depends on a nice, clear signal from dopamine neurons in the brain that’s delivered with precise timing. First, we’re surprised the first time we get a cheeseburger, right? Someone hands us a cheeseburger out of the blue, and dopamine says, “Hey, something good just happened, something I didn’t expect.” But what it’s really doing is it’s telling us to remember all the things that happened before we got that cheeseburger, and try to figure out which of those things are actually related to it, actually predict the fact that we’re going to get a cheeseburger.
So after you’ve had that first cheeseburger, the next time you get a cheeseburger, dopamine does something very different.