What Circuit Are You Choosing to Stimulate?
Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, was recently discussing the roles of modern-day technologies and social media and their effects on the human brain.
Dr. Huberman started the talk referencing some experiments done in the 1960’s. Psychiatrist Robert Heath, received permission to record from the brains of the participants in his experiment. Heath put electrodes into the subject's brains and let them stimulate any area of the brain they wanted. A participant may stimulate one part of the brain and they would then feel kind of drunk. They would then stimulate another area and experience sexual arousal. Another area would trigger laughing and giggling. The interesting outcome was the number 1 area that people liked to stimulate created a sense of mild frustration and anger. Mild frustration and anger? Why would we prefer that over laughing or sexual arousal?
Dr. Huberman goes on to explain that this part of the brain, responsible for the feeling of mild frustration and anger, is tethered to our dopamine system. Now dopamine is the feel-good chemical of our brains usually associated with the reward system. However, dopamine is usually used as a triggering chemical. Used as a source of encouragement for a certain behavior so a reward may be received afterward. Dr. Huberman suggests that this dopamine response to frustration and anger explains not just the human-animal but all animals’ ability to lean into challenges in order to acquire more resources. Our source of encouragement to fight and overcome. If you had a whole species, where everyone just backed away from any frustration and challenge, that would be very problematic for the survival of the species.
Today we are in an extreme state of constant mild anger and frustration. A lot of people are just feeding that frustration and anger in a closed loop. A closed-loop of clicking and scrolling, clicking and scrolling, clicking, and scrolling without actually building anything out of that. Right now, the phone and social media are hijacking that circuitry at a low level and it is subtly gnawing away at our neurology and limiting our focus and ability to cope with life. We need to look at what that neural circuitry was really built for and find new ways to take us out of this loop.
Today, through Dr. Huberman’s Lab, his work with different military groups and other experiments with mice, we have mapped this area of the brain that Heath’s participants liked to stimulate (frustration and anger) and have exactly matched it with the frontal cortex of the brain that leads to forward movement in the presence of stress. This circuit is part of the circuit that underlies the state we would call courage today. Those states of courage were designed to accomplish very specific goals: find food, find a mate, conquer this, or learn this new skill. So, frustration and anger were designed to get us to move forward adaptively. Forward movement balanced by rest is the solution for our neural circuitry.
So, in that closed loop of just clicking and scrolling are we really moving forward? Or is it just providing enough mild frustration that we have to comment on another post; just enough anger that we hit CAPS Lock to digitally yell at someone with a different opinion than us. What is that accomplishing for you? What kind of reward are we getting out of that? As the boundaries between our thoughts (ability to share on social media) is getting smaller, and the boundaries physically between us are getting bigger, we have to look at these technologies and what they are doing to us. Now I am not proposing the solution is to abandon these technologies. The irony of a blog post about limiting phone use while partially being written using a phone is not lost on me. But has it become out of balance? Where else could we find challenge and struggle and decide to move forward? Physical activity? Stillness and meditation? Just some things to ponder in this eventful year as we all try to move our best selves forward and LIVE FREE!
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