Weeks 12-13: Drink the Light

In which the podcaster takes you on a Fantastic Voyage into the wilderness of the brain to discover the roots of the hit song "Dopamine Jones" (c.f. Episode 2).


REFERRED TEXTS

The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman, M.D. and Michael E. Long

• Goodreads page
• Health Sciences Research Commons

Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke, M.D.

• Goodreads page
• NPR interview
• Note: Anna Lembke is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. I mistakenly refer to her as a therapist without citing further.

Cover of "Billie Jean" by sax-playing chickens
(You didn't think I'd leave this out, did you?)

Transcript

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 12 – WEEKS 12-13: Drink the Light

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 12, covering Weeks 12 and 13 of My 12-Month Video Fast. Boy, that was a lot of twelves.

(Ep 3) Previously on My 12-Month Video Fast: (Ep 2) I took down my TV for a year and (Ep 11) I had a backslide… I’ve been phonescrolling more and more… it’s so goddamned compulsive… it might have been a trigger… [plain old inescapable] existential dread… I woke up just having to play a game. I had to fucking play one… binged it all day long… stepped over the line… put on a movie… nihilistic… liked it anyway… maybe I just liked watching… scrolled myself to sleep… Folks, I think it’s time to learn more about dopamine.

So – compulsive scrolling bad. Compulsive scrolling even worse than waiting to go see Deadpool and Wolverine until you’ve compulsively watched or rewatched Deadpool 1 & 2; X-Men, X2, and X-Men: The Last Stand; X-Men: First Class, Days of Future Past, and Apocalypse; X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Wolverine, and Logan; Blade I, II, and Trinity; Daredevil 2003 and Elektra; Fantastic Four 2005 and Rise of the Silver Surfer; the Moon Knight series; Loki Seasons 1 and 2; both seasons of What If…; and the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe through Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness at least, and I’m not going near the comics, just to get most of the references – in Deadpool and Wolverine, in case you’ve forgotten. In other words, I’m finding compulsive phone scrolling to be close to unacceptable, and I’ve set out to learn, if possible, why I do it – maybe why we all do it – and if there’s a way to STOP IT.

[CRITICAL VOICE: You won’t be able to stop it.]

[MOI: You stop it.]

So I picked up two books about dopamine, which the internet consistently suggests is the culprit for much of the compulsive behavior that’s been compulsing me the wrong way. And whaddaya know, I found some interesting stuff in there that I think is worth sharing, for those of you who are curious as well. The first is The Molecule of More, with the provocative subtitle, How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity – and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race, by Daniel Z. Lieberman, M.D. and Michael E. Long. This text is focused on the functions and effects of neurotransmitters, and of dopamine in particular, the eponymous “Molecule of More.” It features social vignettes which are analyzed in light of neuroscience, including a lot of research and some speculation. The other text, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, provides a psychoanalytic perspective by therapist Anna Lembke. She does run through some of the same science as Lieberman and Long, though with somewhat different approaches and explanations, grounded in much more detailed and sometimes intense accounts of addictions and addictive behaviors through which her patients have suffered. She humanizes these experiences and presents some strategies to mitigate them on one’s own, or through therapy and medication. I supplemented the reading of both books with internet searches to confirm or get broader perspectives on core topics, both to gauge their accuracy and general acceptance, and to better understand them myself. 

We’re about to dive head-first into the murky waters of biochemical reductionism, so you might want to slip on your open-minded wetsuit and stay close to the group. I don’t assume anything we’ll come across to be immutable fact, by the way, or my distillations as perfectly explained. With that in mind [SPLASH SOUND], here we go.

Neurotransmitters, or NT’s, you may well know, are chemicals in molecule form that cause neurons, the nerve cells of the brain, to react. Those reactions are pretty much of two kinds, as I understand it: they either cause an individual neuron to produce an electrical charge toward the next neuron in the pathway, which is known as firing, or they inhibit the neuron from firing – kind of like the 1s and 0s of binary code in computers. There are about 86 billion neurons that comprise most of the mass of the brain, and those reactions are happening all over the place all the time, making it about as complicated as my relationships. To oversimplify (yay), the NT’s create all kinds of bodily experiences: e.g., pain, comfort, hunger, joy, grief, euphoria, depression, as well as stimulate behavior: motion, communication; pretty much any behavior you can think of, they’re the neurotransmitters behind the curtain.

Whereas most NT’s react to the world immediately around us, the taste of food, joy of companionship – what Lieberman and Long call the Here & Now – dopamine is unique in that it’s concerned with what’s not right in front of us, what we don’t have. Very generally, it is future-focused and stimulates wanting. (I want you, I want you so baaaaad, babe… Yeah, that would be part of it – the Love Connection.) That excited state of wanting caused by dopamine can seem very similar to those from the present-focused NT’s (endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin, endocannabinoids, among others), but they’re separate neural processes. Think of the difference between enjoying someone’s company and being head-over-heels in love. Lembke exemplifies that difference pretty clearly by recounting an experiment in which “genetically engineered mice unable to make dopamine will not seek out food, and will starve to death even when food is placed just inches from their mouth. Yet if food is put directly into their mouth, they will chew and eat the food and seem to enjoy it.” Dope!

The function of dopamine was discovered in the late 1950s, and to date scientists have identified three main “circuits” in the brain where it influences different aspects of one’s life. I was a little troubled to find that Lieberman and Long only mention two of them in their 225 pages of text, even though they describe the effects of dopamine on the third system without actually naming it. My guess is that’s because this one doesn’t influence moods or states of mind, which is their primary focus, though they still could have given it a short paragraph. The system in question is the most basic of the dopamine circuits, the nigrostriatal pathway, which controls voluntary movement and posture for balance. In other words, you think about taking a step or reaching for a cup of coffee, and dopamine sets the appropriate muscle groups in action. (Note that it’s a different dopamine circuit that makes you want the coffee to begin with. More on that in a moment.) The most salient effect we might see from this circuit is actually when it malfunctions. When the nigrostriatal pathway doesn’t produce enough dopamine, you get Parkinson’s disease, causing the musculature to stiffen and shake and eventually become uncontrollable. Dopamine is commonly administered in pill form to mitigate or alleviate these symptoms. It doesn’t stop the disease from progressing, however, and also ups the dopamine level in the entire brain, not just the nigrostriatal, which can cause side effects like mood swings, hallucinations, delusions, and worse as it stimulates the other two circuits. A friend of mine in his 70s who has been dealing with Parkinson’s for over twenty years (it was early onset) actually quit taking the dopa meds because they made him feel like a junkie with uncontrolled highs and, worse yet, serious withdrawals several times a day. He did have brain surgeries that helped to mitigate some of the symptoms, but the additional meds, which would help his body to move close to normally, also made him feel crazy and weren’t worth it.

The second dopa-parade can be found in the mesolimbic pathway in the middle brain, which Lieberman and Long call the “dopamine desire circuit” and is the one that craved that nice yummy coffee. It’s also the area that can get massively overstimulated by the dopa meds as well as addictive drugs and is the source of the euphoria they cause – while they last. So yes, the mesolimbic pathway is where we’ll be heading to explore most of our compulsive and addictive behaviors. All dopamine signals start in the back of the brain (to be non-sciencey), and the ones that end up in this part of the mid-brain are believed to moderate motivation, reward, and social emotional behavior. It’s the reward center, and despite the warning above, we kinda need it to tell us what essential things we don’t have, like food and rest but also things that improve our lives beyond survival like companionship and community. But it is, as I say, also the center for craving, especially when it gets a little too happy.

The third main dopa-track is the mesocortical pathway or the “dopamine control circuit” per Lieberman and Long. This one stimulates the prefrontal cortex, which is evolutionarily the most recent part of the brain and that big lump behind the forehead. In this circuit dopamine helps us to plan and model things, to conceive abstractions, to rearrange the world into newly-imagined shapes and places and plans of action. It’s the center of creativity and schizophrenia. It’s also where we figure out how to get the drugs that the mesolimbic pathway wants right fucking now. It’s the rational part that either assists or tries to control the irrational middle brain. It’s where grand crimes are hatched, and visions of utopian societies are born. And it's even less concerned than the mesolimbic with the here and now. It’s all about what it can imagine.

As I mentioned, these two books handle these topics somewhat differently, with Lieberman and Long going into a lot more detail in neurological matters. Their text offers chapters that biochemically deconstruct the experience of love (emotional longing, not lust), the effects of drugs (the greatest overlap of the two books), and the drive to dominate (the function of the dopamine control circuit both in trying to manage the world in general and the desire center – though it can run out of steam with that task. They also get into the fine line between creativity and madness in the neocortical pathway (and why that line is so fine), and how both of these circuits play out in politics and progress. They end with several speculations on where our dopamine systems may be leading us, from the obvious (overconsumption and climate crisis) to the slightly bizarre (a very strong concern about lower population growth, which would seem like more of a good sign to me).

Lembke, on the other hand, is much more about how to manage an overly dopaminergic brain and its contemporary temptations. With some neurological background, she focuses on techniques for addressing, mitigating, and hopefully overcoming compulsions and addictions. This is all experiential work, and while it is fascinating (and feels at times prurient) to witness some of the desperate circumstance that people have been through, the object lessons are reasonably predictable for anyone familiar with the wiles and labyrinths of addiction. Not to undervalue any of it, though she does at one point remind me that my own minor situation of enacting a video fast is itself well-trod territory. Recalling some of her patients’ strategies for distancing themselves from addictive triggers, she quotes several as saying, “‘I unplugged my TV and put it in my closet.’ ‘I banished my game console to the garage.’ ‘I don’t use credit cards. Only cash.’ ‘I call hotels beforehand to ask them to remove the minibar.’ “I call hotels beforehand to ask them to remove the minibar and the television.’ ‘I put my iPad in a safety deposit box at Bank of America,’” leaving me to wonder whether these people have been listening to my podcast – several years ago. Lembke also affirms an important part of my experience by noting some therapeutic agreement that it takes four weeks on average for a brain to balance out a dopamine deficiency, which is exactly what I went through in June. I knew it!

One appreciable point on which both books agree is to note that our brains are ancient organs in which these processes evolved – slowly – to aid in our survival. And dopamine in particular is focused on both our immediate and long-term survival. Rather than thinking of it as the neurotransmitter that makes you crave sugar or want to buy that spiffy pair of shoes, consider it as the motivator to hunt and gather, and to seek shelter, and to seek and devise better shelter, and to best determine where to settle once you’ve depleted this area of grains and game. These authors (and others), it turns out, find our current culture to be in an egregious state, wherein our mesolimbic pathways are constantly overstimulated with cravings, with desire (without even adding addictive substances into the mix), as we’re driven to want more and more of everything, far beyond our needs and means and beyond the capacity of our planet to sustain them, while our mesocortical forward-thinking minds flail, languish, and atrophy in the overwhelming tide. The neocortex often isn’t strong enough to control a mesolimbic on steroids, so to speak. Lembke notes, “Our brains are not evolved for this world of plenty. As Dr. Tom Finucane said, ‘We are cacti in the rain forest.’ And like cacti adapted to an arid climate, we are drowning in dopamine.” Lieberman and Long evaluate this a bit more soberly: 

As a species we have become far more powerful than we were when our brains first developed. Technology develops fast while evolution is slow. Our brains evolved at a time when survival was in doubt. That’s less of a problem in the modern world, but we’re stuck with our ancient brains.

It’s possible that we won’t last beyond another half-dozen generations. We’ve simply become too good at gratifying our dopaminergic desires: not all forms of more and new and novel are good for an individual, and the same is true for a species. Dopamine doesn’t stop. It drives us ever onward into the abyss…. It may be that our dopaminergic-driven ingenuity will help us find a safe way through the reefs and shoals of humanity’s ever-accelerating progress. Then again, maybe not.

 They don’t say by what criteria they’ve set that ticking clock, but given their argument and the world out my window, it does seem credible. If that’s not a call to action, I don’t know what is.

Well, that’s my book report for the month. They did say a lot more and I’m happy to answer any questions you might have. I’ve simplified a lot of stuff that the authors had already simplified, and I’m not 100% sure to what extent their conclusions are solid and well-founded, but I did present what seemed to make good sense to me. And why go through the exercise to simply set it aside, especially after such a dramatic conclusion? So I’d like to spend the rest of the pod testing it out on a few familiar experiences, including the one that started this circuit firing.

I went to see Alien: Romulus, and yes, in a theater – I was following the rules. It’s the new Alien movie that’s co-written and directed by Fede Alvarez, and the seventh in the series (not including the two Alien v Predator flicks). For some reason I love the Alien movies and have seen most of them when they came out in theaters. Even though I found Alien 3 like most fans to be painful and Alien Resurrection (that’s #4) just plain loopy, both amusing if disappointing entries that took the series in unsatisfying and weird directions, I still love them because they’re Alien movies. So I guess I must love those aliens – which I do! I’m fascinated by their form and (most of) their various mutations. (The director’s cut of Alien 3 actually has one in the form of an ox! That’s fucked up.) They’re terrifying and mesmerizing and beautiful at the same time. Their novelty never gets dull for me, so I guess that makes them dopamine-triggers for any occasion. Thank you H. R. Giger for that. I’ve seen the first two of the series at least 30 times each, probably more. No exagg there. So why, you ask, would I do that – or would anyone? To those who might ask, I ask right back, “Ever listened to a music album over and over – ever?” Same thing, pretty much – because it’s familiar and it makes me happy. That’s what we call comfort food, and you know there’s a dopa craving for that.

So what did my dopamine think about Alien: Romulus? To answer that fully I’ll have to give a little spoiler – not to the plot, but to the marketing, which is to say, they lied. They claimed this film, while taking place between Alien and Aliens (the first two), was a stand-alone in the franchise with no real connection to any of the others. Well it might be a stand-alone in the sense that the youngers (or the uninitiated) can watch it without having seen the others (mostly), but in fact it had big and very direct connections to the first movie, and a direct connect to Prometheus, the first prequel, as well. I loved all those connections and give them two D’s up – big dopa spikes there. The other references to the series, which are many, were done as Easter eggs and homages: as in very similar shots and framing, props from the other films in the background, identical electronic sound effects for no apparent reason, and close or identical dialog, scenes, or scenarios, most of which gave me a dopamine drop by breaking my suspension of disbelief (I want to believe!) and pulling me out of the film. The same thing happened to me watching It Part 2 in a scene that was copied almost directly, including an iconic line, from John Carpenter’s The Thing, which yanked me out of another otherwise great experience. But I imagine the homages here are not for the rare few who have seen the films so many times (yes, even the ones I don’t like as much), and which for folks who saw them long ago might be playful reminders rather than misplaced reenactments. But I also enjoyed the familiarity of that universe and some recognizable plot beats, and I was totally D’ing out on a few scenes that were brand new set pieces and super clever – one so clever that I laughed right through it, like Yeeaaah. So for the most part a D-positive on this film and I’m sure I’ll see it again multiple times (after next June). 

Having established, as much as one can establish anything in the morass called a brain, that there’s a reason to crave and take pleasure in the familiar, let’s turn for a minute to Mass Effect, the video game trilogy that I described in the previous episode of this podcast. If you’ve heard that one, you’ll recall that I’ve played the trilogy through, at a hundred-plus hours per game (I’m a completionist), almost three full times in the last year and a half before the advent of this video fast. I mean, what? Seeing Alien thirty-plus times is understandable, but how could I (or anyone) spend hundreds and hundreds of hours playing the same games repeatedly, each of which it to some extent itself a series of shoot-em-up space missions? Can you say cray-cray? Actually more and more doctors and scientists are studying and treating videogame addiction than ever before, especially in adolescents who fall more easily under the thrall and can potentially get stuck there. Gaming can actively shape their brains as they develop. Games produce more dopamine hits than TV or movies, and in fact are more akin to casino games and slot machines, at least as far as addiction specialists are concerned, regularly dispensing rewards both expected and (for an even bigger hit) unexpected. So there’s your mesolimbic. And many of them are about saving the world or making a better one – Mass Effect sure is. So there’s your mesocortical. As well, you the player (or your character) (or both) progress over the course of the game – you level up repeatedly, which normally makes you stronger or your weapons more effective. On top of that, I was playing each round of the trilogy on higher difficulty levels, which affect the entire game, because I was getting to be a better and better shot. (Keep in mind what I said about wanting me on your side…) But as much as anything, it was the familiarity of the characters, who are smart and funny and complex (enough) and terrifically portrayed, that brought me back again and again; because as much as the games convert enemies and targets into Walter Benjamin’s soulless people who seem okay to gun down, they make the crew feel like old friends and companions. And I do still miss hanging out with Shepherd and Liara and Wrex and Garrus and Kaidan [*sigh*], but I hope they’re all getting along well without me because they’re staying locked in the closet (no, not that one) at least until this video fast is over, if not beyond.

Some things that are not hidden away, and in fact are right out on a shelf, are books. So while we’re at this, let’s take on one of them. I recently reread one of my favorite novels which I hadn’t picked up in a couple of decades. That was In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, which I’ve mentioned here before. It’s a semi-historical novel that takes place in the 1910s - 30s, centering on the urbanization of Toronto and how several characters come together during that era. I’ve read it numerous times in the past and taught it in a few undergrad classes at Brooklyn College in the early 00s. I love Ondaatje’s novels because his characters are always brimming with intelligence – of different kinds and I’m not talking about IQ, but everyone gets to be a genius of something. Patrick, for instance, is a genius of dynamite; Clara of connection; Alice of empathy; Nicolas of his body in space; and Caravaggio of stealth. It doesn’t come across as crafted-in; rather it feels as if Ondaatje just trusts his people to know their own intelligence. Just watching these characters in motion dopa’s me right up – always has, as in all of his books – while the comfort of the familiar setting and story conveys a relaxing vantage for me, regardless of how challenging or violent the world they dwell in might be. 

So what’s the difference between movie-dopa and book-dopa? First of all, with a book I don’t feel like there’s a portal of light and noise reaching through my eyes to squeeze my brain for juice. It’s not that books can’t have or be a good thrill ride – in fact this one has a couple of action sequences that rival the frenetic peaks of John Grisham or Stephen King, with contemplative passages in abundance as well. Beyond that, a book has a leg up to a place that screen-dopa can never reach: it invites and employs your mesocortical path to envision the world that it creates as you read. It’s more of a whole-brain activity, piecing together the writer’s vision and your own, and as such engenders a province that you partake in actively. Maybe that’s why reading is often more conceptually generative than watching a mainstream film, say, how it inspires and allows an abundance of fresh thoughts and ideas, since you’re already helming a vehicle loaned to you by the grace of the author.

But let me stop dilly-dallying and ninnyhammering around here and get to the purported point of all this: why do we phonescroll and how can we stop it? Well the first part is easy, because feeds on your phone are designed to set off dopamine hits, often but not always small ones, so you need to re-up regularly. Yep. They know all about it. They measure how long you pause on any given pic or vid, and monetize as many clicks as possible. Then they send your data through algorithms within algorithms to set you up with more of the same. Remember, dopamine loves unexpected rewards more than most anything (except crack). So as long as you eventually get you summa that, it doesn’t matter how long you’re bored nearly to death by scrolling. Your brain tells you to pick up your phone, and you do, and your thumb goes at it, flipping past everything you’ve seen and everything you don’t want to see, until whap! There are those chickens singing to Peter Gabriel. Score! Now let’s find another. And another. Which is bettering your life how?

Now I’ll grant you that every so rarely it’s incredibly healthy to watch singing chickens for a minute, or three grown men dressed in realistic chicken costumes bobbing around a yard playing “Billie Jean” on saxophones in the style of chicken squawks (which I did come across recently and felt my day was better for it). But mostly it’s nothing, nothing, nothing, and all in the service of profit, profit, profit and fuck your time, you’re stupid enough to be doing it. And knowing that is exactly how you stop, because you need a reason and maybe a little extra oomph for your dopamine control center to kick this little dopamine desire center habit right into the gutter where it belongs, so maybe the idea that they’re laughing at you for their gain might just get that rolling.

Here's another idea: even though you’ll still be pixel-drinking, assuming that you’re out and about and not home in your comfy READING CHAIR, you can read a book on your phone. So maybe drop a stack of good ones in your Kindle (or Whatever) app, then put the Kindle (or Whatever) icon in the middle of every screen on your phone; or even better replace every crappy hypnotic feed app – the News Feed, Facebook, Instagram, Twatter (yes I know what it’s called now), Tik-tok, Pinterest, Flickr, whichever ones leave you drooling – replace each icon with the Kindle app. Then every time you auto-tap one of those nasty feeds, you’ll be reading a luscious book instead. Any book will do! They’re all whole-brain activities and will only make you stronger (except Twilight [*shudder*]). I know, it’s like asking you to trade ice cream for water, but don’t be a baby or don’t bother – what do I care if you whittle your life away.

Or, if you’re tired of listening to me – I know I would be by now – maybe you’ll listen to someone who really knows what their talking about [POLTERGEIST MOM]: “Sweetheart, stay away from the light, the light is dangerous, don't go near it, don't even look at the light…” Yep, good advice there. And maybe, just maybe the more we replace our drool-fodder light-slurping with whole-brain activities, maybe we’ll have the slightest, most minute chance to curb our species’ overconsumption and guide ourselves forebrain first into a brave new future that’s actually brave and new.

This week I’d like to thank two new subscribers to this podcast: Harold Lehman of Austin, Texas, mensch, musician, and member of Vibraskull and Retail Giant (look for them both on Bandcamp), and Gary Turchin of Berkeley, California, poet and deep-hearted soul who graciously spoke with me about his struggles with Parkinson’s for this episode. Thank you both from my nigrostriatal, mesolimbic, and mesocortical pathways. 

The next episode will be one week from today on September 7, the first Saturday of the month, and I’ll let you know if I’ve smashed that phonescrolling habit into the ground, or just my phone.

This has been Episode 12, covering Weeks 12 and 13 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

Thank you for whole-brain listening.

[“DOPAMINE JONES” send off.]