by Adam Alter
The rats did two things after surgery, one of which surprised Berridge and one of which didn’t. As he expected, they stopped drinking the sugary liquid. The surgery had knocked out their appetite by preventing their brains from producing dopamine. But the rats continued to lick their lips when he fed them the sugar water directly. They didn’t seem to want it—but when they tasted it, they seemed to get just as much pleasure as they had before the surgery. Without dopamine they lost their appetite for sugar water, but still enjoyed it when they tasted it anyway.
“It took about ten years for this to sink in among the neuroscience community,” Berridge says. The findings contradicted what neuroscientists long felt they knew to be true. “For a number of years people in the neuroscience world told us, ‘No, we know dopamine drives pleasure; you have to be wrong.’ But then evidence started to come in from studies on humans, and now very few researchers doubt our findings. In those studies, researchers would give people cocaine or heroin, as well as a second drug that was designed to block dopamine production. Blocking dopamine didn’t reduce the pleasure they felt—but it did reduce the amount they took.”
Berridge and his colleagues had shown that there was a big difference between liking a drug and wanting a drug. Addiction was about more than just liking. Addicts weren’t people who happened to like the drugs they were taking—they were people who wanted those drugs very badly even as they grew to dislike them for destroying their lives. What makes addiction so difficult to treat is that wanting is much harder to defeat than liking. “When people make decisions, they privilege wanting over liking,” Berridge said. “Wanting is much more robust and big and broad and powerful. Liking is anatomically tiny and fragile—it’s easily disrupted and it occupies only a very small part of the brain. In contrast, it’s not easy to disrupt the activation of an intense want. Once people want a drug, it’s nearly permanent—it lasts at least a year in most people, and may last almost a whole lifetime.” Berridge’s ideas explain why relapse is so common. Even after you come to hate a drug for ruining your life, your brain continues to want the drug. It remembers that the drug soothed a psychological need in the past, and so the craving remains. The same is true of behaviors: even as you come to loathe Facebook or Instagram for consuming too much of your time, you continue to want updates as much as you did when they still made you happy. One recent study suggests that playing hard to get has the same effect: an unattainable romantic partner is less likable but more desirable, which explains why some people find emotionally unavailable partners alluring.
Liking and wanting overlap most of the time, which clouds their differences. We tend to want things that we like, and vice versa, because most pleasant things are good for us, and most unpleasant things are bad for us. The baby rats in Berridge’s studies had evolved to instinctively like the taste of sugar water, because sweet substances tend to be both harmless and rich in calories. Their ancestor rats who gravitated toward sweet foods tended to live longer and to mate with other rats, so their sweet-tooth proclivity was passed down from one generation to the next. The rats who ate bitter foods were more likely to die, either from poisoning or from malnutrition. Very few truly bitter foods are packed with nutrients, and from a young age we avoid the many bitter plants and roots that happen to be toxic. Though they’re often linked, Berridge showed that liking and wanting take different paths in the case of addiction. The depths of addiction are no fun at all, which is another way of saying that addicts crave a hit without liking the experience. Stanton Peele likened addiction to misguided love, and falling in love with the wrong person is a classic case of wanting without liking. Loving the wrong person is so common that we have stereotypes for the “guy who’s no good” and the “femme fatale.” We know they’re no good for us, but we can’t help wanting them.
Although Berridge spends more time investigating drug addiction, like Stanton Peele and Andrew Lawrence he believes his ideas also apply to behavioral addictions. “We always knew drugs could influence these brain systems, but we didn’t know the same about behaviors. Over the past fifteen years or so, we’ve come to learn that the same is true of behaviors—and the process works through the same brain mechanisms.” Just as drugs trigger dopamine production, so do behavioral cues. When a gaming addict fires up his laptop, his dopamine levels spike; when an exercise addict laces her running shoes, her dopamine levels spike. From there, these behavioral addicts look a lot like drug addicts. Addictions aren’t driven by substances or behaviors, but by the idea, learned across time, that they protect addicts from psychological distress.
The truth about addiction challenges many of our intuitions. It isn’t the body falling in unrequited love with a dangerous drug, but rather the mind learning to associate any substance or behavior with relief from psychological pain. In fact, addiction isn’t about falling in love; as Kent Berridge showed, all addicts want the object of their addiction, but many of them don’t like it at all. As for Isaac Vaisberg, Andrew Lawrence’s Parkinson’s patients, and Rat No. 34, addiction persists even after its appeal wanes, leaving intact the desire for gaming, tidying up obsessively, or self-administering a shock long after the pleasure has gone.
PART 2
The Ingredients of Behavioral Addiction (or, How to Engineer an Addictive Experience)
4.
Goals
In 1987, three Australian neurologists stumbled upon a simple technique that improved the lives of thousands of Parkinson’s patients. The disease renders many patients unable to walk as tremors cause them to freeze in place. The neurologists began their report by describing an accidental discovery. A man who had suffered from Parkinson’s for eleven years was still able to stand from a seated position, but he could no longer walk. One morning he swung his legs over the side of his bed, and planted them firmly on the ground. He rose, and once he was standing looked down and noticed that his shoes sat neatly just in front of his feet, like two small hurdles. Much to his surprise, instead of struggling to walk, he was able to take a tentative step over the one shoe, and then a second step over the other. The shoes were now behind him. With the help of the bite-sized goal of stepping over his shoes, he had managed for the first time in years to walk rather than shuffle.
The man was enterprising. He experimented with different techniques. First he carried small objects wherever he went, tossing them a couple of inches ahead whenever he froze in place. Soon you could trace his path around the house by following the trail of household items. Then, overwhelmed by the motley detritus strewn across his floor, he discovered that he could use his walking stick as a reusable hurdle. He turned the walking stick upside down so its handle met the ground just in front of his right foot. With the handle as a hurdle, he took a first step, and then repeated the tactic with his left foot. Having gained some momentum after a couple of steps, he established a regular gait and managed to walk slowly without the aid of his stick.
The man visited his neurologist, one of the three who went on to write the landmark paper, and demonstrated his new trick. The neurologist was floored. How was it possible that a hurdle had improved his patient’s gait? The answer is that, if you want to compel people to act, you whittle down overwhelming goals into smaller goals that are concrete and easier to manage. Humans are driven by a sense of progress, and progress is easier to perceive when the finish line is in sight. Using his walking stick, the man created a series of bite-sized goals that were easy to digest. When the neurologist and two of his colleagues confirmed that the approach worked for other Parkinson’s patients, they described it in the paper that armed neurologists with a new tool to treat one of Parkinson’s most debilitating symptoms.
Like small hurdles to a Parkinson’s patient, goals often inspire action because they become fixation points. You can see this when you examine the finishing times of millions of goal-driven marathon runners.
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The average marathon runner completes the 26.2 mile (42.2 kilo
meter) course in roughly four and a half hours. At the extremes, elite male athletes run the distance in just over two hours, while the slowest walkers spend ten or more hours on the course. You might expect a smooth distribution of times between those extremes. Something like this, where the height of each bar indicates how many runners finished with that time:
A small group of runners finish in less than three hours, with slower times becoming more common until a peak at four hours and three minutes (the dark bar). There aren’t any obvious jumps or troughs in the distribution, which is typical of how humans perform many physical tasks.
But that’s not how the distribution actually looks, because certain milestone times are more meaningful than others. I know this from experience, because I ran the New York City Marathon in 2010. Many athletes run behind pacesetters who carry large placards displaying times like “3:00,” “3:30,” or “4:00.” The pacesetters who carry those signs are experienced runners who aim to finish just under those milestones, and they usually succeed. I followed the 3:30 pacesetter for as long as I could, but as the race wore on I slowed down. When the 3:30 pacesetter was so far ahead that I could barely read his sign, the 4:00 pacesetter came up alongside me. I abandoned my race plan and set a new, firm goal: this might be my only marathon, so I absolutely had to finish in under four hours. Now a few miles from the end of the race, I was utterly depleted. I remember wolfing down a couple of bananas offered by a kind spectator who took pity on me. A friend jumped onto the course and shouted, “Good job! You’re right on pace to finish in under four hours and five minutes!” His words exposed a hidden well of energy, and I ran slightly faster for the remainder of the race. My time: 3:57:55. When I found the same friend after the race he told me he had lied. “You were on track to finish in just under four hours, but I was worried you might slow down,” he told me. “I knew you’d dig deeper if you thought you were on track to finish in 4:05.” The 2010 New York City Marathon was my first and last so far, but I’d have run the race again in 2011 had my finishing time exceeded four hours.
I’m not alone. In 2014, four behavioral scientists plotted the finishing times of almost ten million marathon runners on a single graph:
If you focus on the milestone times that arrive every half hour, you can see my struggle writ large. The dark bars indicate times just below those milestones (2:59, 3:29, 3:59, and 4:29), and you can see they’re a lot more common than slightly slower times (the two or three shorter bars to their right). Runners somehow find buried stores of energy as they strive to beat significant milestones, so many more of them finish in, say, 3:58 or 3:59 than in 4:01 or 4:02. In a race like the New York City Marathon, with almost fifty thousand runners, five hundred will finish with a time of 3:59, while just three hundred and ninety will finish with a time of 4:01. The size of that difference captures how urgently marathon runners want to finish in less than four hours. That’s the compelling power of goals: even when you’re two bananas shy of collapsing, you find the will to go on. So what happens when you reach your goal?
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Robert Beamon was born into a poor family in Queens, New York, just after the end of World War II. His father was abusive and his mother feared for Bob’s life, so young Bob was sent to live with his grandmother. By the time he attended high school, he was tall, wiry, and athletic. He liked running and jumping, and a scout took notice as he bounded down the long jump runway. He began to win U.S. high school titles, and by the time he graduated from high school he was among the best two or three long jumpers in the country. Beamon accepted a scholarship to the University of Texas at El Paso, where he adopted the ultimate goal for elite athletes: to win Olympic gold.
Beamon’s opportunity came in 1968, at the Mexico City Olympic Games. He arrived in Mexico City having won twenty-two of his previous twenty-three events, and was hotly favored to win gold. But Beamon panicked. During the qualifying rounds, something didn’t feel right. For the first time in years he was wracked with nerves. Out of sorts, Beamon misjudged his run-up, and fouled his first two jumps. Everything rode on his third and final chance to qualify. Ralph Boston, the reigning world record holder and Beamon’s teammate, pulled Beamon aside and told him to jump conservatively. In Beamon’s memory, “he said, ‘pull it back three feet, and if you have to jump behind the board, jump behind the board.’” On his third and final jump, despite leaping from far behind the board, Beamon managed to qualify.
The final began the next morning. When Beamon reflected on the event in an interview, forty years later, he remembered feeling “calm, very peaceful.” He later told interviewers he had thrown back a couple of tequila shots the night before, briefly abandoning his abstemious training regime. Three athletes were listed to jump before Beamon, but all three fouled their initial jumps, so Beamon was left without a target distance. His first jump took just seven seconds from beginning to end. He tore down the runway and leapt high and far, coming down a very long way from the beginning of the sandpit. Beamon leapt so far that the electronic measurement system was incapable of calculating the jump’s distance. You can still watch the footage today: an earnest official moves the measuring device to the end of a fixed railing, and allows himself a brief smile when he realizes the jump is unmeasurable. The officials confer briefly before they realize there isn’t a suitable measuring tape in the stadium. One of them is dispatched to find a tape while the event is suspended. Forty-five minutes pass, a tape is found, and after measuring and remeasuring, the officials put a number to Beamon’s colossal leap: eight meters and ninety centimeters, or twenty-nine feet, two and a half inches. Beamon had jumped almost two feet—fifty-five centimeters—farther than any other man in history. He collapsed to the track as Boston tried to help him to his feet, only to collapse again before his legs could support his weight. Watching the footage, one doctor diagnosed Beamon with a cataplectic seizure brought on by the emotional shock of his achievement. The jump was so impressive that the word Beamonesque came to signify an otherworldly achievement that dwarfs its predecessors.
Beamon had demolished his athletic goals. He was an Olympic gold medalist and a world record holder. A dejected Lynn Davies, the defending Olympic long jump champion, asked, “What’s the point? Beamon’s jump has destroyed the event.” To Russian champion Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, Beamon’s competitors were mere “children.” The record stood for almost twenty-three years, until U.S. athlete Mike Powell surpassed Beamon’s mark by a couple of inches—a record that still stands today.
In theory Beamon should have been elated. After a shaky qualifying round, he managed to summon a performance regularly cited among the five greatest athletic feats of all time. The remainder of that day should have been one of the greatest of Beamon’s life. But that’s not what happened. In 2008, he remembered his celebration lasting only a few minutes. “When I got to the medal stand, I said, ‘what am I gonna do? I’ve reached one stage, and so what is the next peak experience in my life?’”
A week after the event he was taking sociology classes toward a master’s degree at Adelphi University. He all but abandoned athletics, and even today you can see when he’s asked about the feat that it doesn’t bring him much joy. He summons a brief nod, quietly admits the jump was impressive despite his modest disposition, and then goes on to discuss his work as a philanthropist or the virtues of his Olympic teammates.
Beamon is perhaps unusually reserved, but even flamboyant goal-setters struggle with outrageous success. That was certainly the case for Michael Larson, a legend in the world of TV game shows.
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Larson was known as a goal guy. He pursued goals constantly, sometimes small ones and sometimes big ones. Many of them involved making money, because Michael was born in 1949 to a family of modest means in small-town Lebanon, Ohio. Sometimes his behavior wasn’t strictly ethical. That was true of the time he quietly sold candy bars at a profit to his middle school classmates, and of the time he opened up multiple bank accounts
under different names so he could claim the bank’s five-hundred-dollar new account bonus. Larson was a serial goal monogamist, lining up one goal after another and rarely attacking a new one until his current project was complete. He was rarely without a quest, and he was restless without a new one on the horizon. It was this fevered approach to goals that triggered his undoing.
In the summer of 1983, Larson was thirty-four years old and unemployed, apart from scattered work as an ice cream truck driver and air conditioner repairman. He assembled a huge wall of TVs and obsessively scoured the networks for moneymaking opportunities. Eventually, he found his mark in the form of a new game show. Press Your Luck premiered on CBS in September 1983. The show’s premise was simple: contestants answered trivia questions to accumulate “spins,” and then used those spins on a big game board to win cash and prizes while avoiding “whammy” squares that returned their winnings to zero. Contestants watched as a flashing light darted around the game board’s eighteen squares, and pressed a red button to stop the light wherever it happened to be at the time. The content of each square changed from moment to moment, making it very difficult to predict whether the selected square would depict cash, prizes, or a whammy. Hence the show’s name: contestants could choose to pass their remaining spins to the next player, or continue to “press their luck” by taking another turn. The game was designed so the light landed on a whammy every five or six spins, preventing players from stringing together more than a handful of winning spins in a row.
Larson watched the game with great interest. To most people the board seemed to behave randomly, but Larson wasn’t like most people. He sat, day after day, recording the outcome of each spin until a series of patterns resolved before him. He shared the discovery with his wife: the flashing light followed five distinct patterns, and no matter which pattern it followed, two of the eighteen squares never displayed a whammy. In one pattern, for example, the flashing light landed on a safe square after landing on four dangerous squares. With practice, anyone could learn to game the system. Larson had a new goal.