Dope, or dopamine, seems to be a type of chemical messenger that runs between the cells in our brains with pom poms shouting “YAY, Let’s celebrate, this is AWESOME!”
When this happens we get a little shot of pleasure, causing us to want to do the thing we just did, again.
My friend Todd told me about the power of checking off items on a ‘to do’ list and how each time you did this, you’d get a little shot of dopamine.
He called them ‘hits of success’.
I guess you could call this ‘good dope’ since it’s being used to reinforce productive behavior.
But is their a more dark and sinister side?
I recently watched a video of Sean Parker, billionaire & former President of Facebook.
He said that when he and Mark Z, and others were planning the platform the one question they obsessed on was “how do we consume as much of people’s time as humanly possible?”
He said they knew that they needed to give people dopamine hits to get them addicted to viewing, liking, commenting, sharing, uploading content.
He said, and I quote, “We exploited a loophole in human psychology. …like a hacker would exploit a vulnerability in a computer system. We knew exactly what we were doing, and we did it anyway.”
hmmmm.
Bad dope?