![give me a rooftop [with taller buildings surrounding it]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/14008ae7a0e1d056396e132d4a8e4516/tumblr_n3qqifbpEQ1qbytg0o1_250.jpg)
and I will help you to see
the beauty you miss."
(Source: caciazoo, via marcuslikesit)
When you’re at a dead end, you can’t see where you started. You look to the right and you look to the left and you have no options. You’re attached and estranged from your beginning. Then you look forward and there’s a wall.
This is the best place to be. It’s true in science, in business, in art and in love.
Why is this such a good place to be? Well, you cannot have a breakthrough without being at a dead end.
The breakthrough comes because you’ve exhausted all of your resources. And you know what? All breakthroughs happen in exactly the same way. There’s a wall in front of you and you have to break it. And all breakthroughs happen because of an act of faith.
You think to yourself, I’m gonna go back a bit…and i’m gonna crash through that wall. And you will. You’ll probably get cut, scratched…you might even tear your clothes a little bit.
The thing on the other side is a garden. And it is all there for you.
Hopefully, if everything goes right for you, you’ll hit another wall…
#deadends
“If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people, what would it be?”
“When a wave comes, go deep.”
“I think I’m going to need an explanation for that one.”
“There’s three things you can do when life sends a wave at you. You can run from it, but then it’s going to catch up and knock you down. You can also fall back on your ego and try to stand your ground, but then it’s still going to clobber you. Or you can use it as an opportunity to go deep, and transform yourself to match the circumstances. And that’s how you get through the wave.”
Don’t know if I ever posted this, but I can never post this too much
(via humansofnewyork)
>What EXACTLY is your brain doing when you’re on the Internet? Lost At E Minor finds out
A simple yet brilliant question was posed to Redditors a couple of days ago in the /r/askreddit community: ‘What’s your earliest memory of the internet?‘ Many users reminisced about the ‘screeching demon’ modems of the early nineties or the basic chatrooms where users would start every question with ‘a/s/l?’
My earliest memory of the internet was as a young teen. We didn’t have enough money to afford a computer at home so I would spend every Saturday at an Internet cafe, talking to as many new people as possible (on Yahoo chat, of course) and searching the web on AltaVista for things like movie showtimes or ‘how to make my own Geocities web page‘.
Image via Jeffrey Zeldman/Flickr
Back then — this was the mid to late nineties — the Internet was a novelty and while fun to play around with, was hardly an everyday-use kind of thing like it is now. In fact, back in the mid-nineties, there were just under 200 million Internet users, compared to a whopping 2.9 billion today.
The Internet has become the centre of our lives. We talk to our boss through email, we chat with our friends through Gchat, we order our gifts from Amazon — but have you ever stopped to ask yourself what happens to us as we spend more and more time online?
Your Brain On The Internet
Zach Parton from the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center (CNADC) reminds us that everything we do affects our brains physically.
‘Every stimulus we encounter, every behavior we engage in, every habit we form changes the wiring, composition, and reaction of our brains to future stimuli’, he says. ‘We are a constantly learning, constantly changing system that is one of the most highly adaptable to have emerged in the course of evolution’.
And so your brain is affected by your time on the Internet. You see, our brains are reward-driven and wired to seek out new information. The Internet, as you know, is full of new information — it’s an information lover’s fantasy — so when you log onto the net, search for something and then find it, your brain actually releases small amounts of dopamine.
Dopamine is released in all sorts of everyday scenarios, like when you eat or have sex.
Dopamine works as a neurotransmitter to send signals to nerve cells in your body to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, among other things. Dopamine is released in all sorts of everyday scenarios, like when you eat or have sex. But dopamine also delivers big hits in cocaine and heroin use. Those warm, fuzzy drug highs all result from altered dopamine levels in your body’s system.
This dandy little neurotransmitter is also released when we learn something new on the Internet. You know that warm and fuzzy feeling you felt when you read about the dog who was rescued by strangers? Or that TIL Reddit post that taught you all about ice sculpting techniques? Yeah, that was dopamine doing its job.But guess what we want after we’ve received that pleasurable reward of dopamine? More. We want more. We’ll get back to dopamine in just a little while…
Your Brain Is Changing With Each Click
In a recent interview with The Huffington Post, journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Nicholas Carr spoke about the effects of the Internet on our memory.
‘Technology definitely has an effect on our memory’, Carr says. ‘What happens is that to move information from your conscious mind (what’s known as the working memory) into your long-term memory requires a process of memory consolidation that hinges on attentiveness. You think about the information or rehearse it in your mind in order to form a strong memory of it, and in order to connect it to other things that you remember.
‘If you’re constantly distracted and taking in new information, you’re essentially pushing information into and out of your conscious mind. You’re not attending to it in a way that is necessary for the rich consolidation of memory’.
Technology definitely has an effect on our memory.
Zach Parton echoes Carr’s views on this: ‘I believe this is the crux of the interent’s effect on our brains. Besides the fact that people don’t feel the need to commit facts to long-term memory (queue cliché ‘Because it’s always there to be ‘googled’), I think that Internet use (the way that most people use it) has a much more insidious effect targeting memory’.
‘In some ways, the internet introduces an entropy into our thoughts that discourages and conditions us against building large, complex, and detailed behaviors’, Parton continues.
‘The shifting patterns with low-impact consequences for retention train our brains to accept and crave novelty, and makes it extremely hard to take a deeply-critical position towards something, because the larger context is truncated with the illusion that it has been accurately summarized, or is dispensable’.
How else is the brain affected by the Internet? Well, strap in for the next piece of information because this one’s juicy: Our brains actually adapt to our experiences and environment (this is called neuroplasticity).
This is where things get interesting. A study of London taxi drivers revealed that those who had been driving the streets of London for two years or more (and who had memorized London’s 25,000 streets and landmarks) ‘displayed a measurable increase in the size of the posterior hippocampus, a selection of the brain associated with spatial memory’. So the longer a cabbie had been driving, the larger this part of his/her brain would likely be.
Carr further explains this notion of neuroplasticity: ‘Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain is plastic, meaning that it’s very malleable or adaptable. Our brains are constantly adapting at a physical level to our environment. You can imagine that what’s really changed our environment in the past 10 or 20 years is the Internet and social media’.
The internet introduces an entropy into our thoughts that discourages and conditions us against building large, complex, and detailed behaviors.
Internet Addiction On The Brain
You can get addicted to alcohol, cocaine, food — but the Internet? Can you really get addicted to the Internet? Sadly, yes.
Remember that neurotransmitter dopamine? Well as it turns out, people can actually become obsessed with seeking out those pleasurable feelings that dopamine sends to your pleasure centres. After all, why would you stop pleasurable experiences? They make us feel happy!
Through brain scans, research has shown that screen addiction (in the gaming context) can cause gray matter atrophy, cortical thickness abnormalities which correlates to impaired task performance, and impaired cognitive functioning.
And get this — research back in 2011 found that cravings for Internet gaming were similar to drug cravings.
To delve even further into how we become addicted to the Internet, we spoke to Dr. Andrew Zalesky, a researcher at the University of Melbourne, based at the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre.
Image via Wikipedia
‘Remarkably, the disruptions in brain connectivity we see in individuals with excessive Internet use resemble those disruptions seen in other disorders associated with addiction, such as pathological gambling and drug/alcohol dependence’, Dr. Zalesky said in an email.
‘This suggests a shared phenotype between Internet addiction and the classic forms of addiction. One of the neural signatures of addiction is disruption to the striatal circuits of the brain. In particular, neural communication between striatal regions and other areas of the brain are reduced in addictive disorders, including Internet addiction.
‘However, the pattern of connectivity disruptions seen in individuals with excessive Internet use appears to also involve brain regions that are not commonly seen with other forms of addiction. Further research is needed to determine the unique neural markers of Internet addiction and those that are shared with other forms of addiction’.
You might be a robot if you’re not fascinated and in awe of these findings.
And get this piece of information about what’s happening to our brain, from Zach Parton:
‘Studies have shown that the brain responds to ‘notifications’ in a similar way that it does cocaine. This means there is dopamanergic excitation in a manner that conditions us to want more. This happens with everything from candy to sex.
‘However, we do see that there is a general pleasurable response to using Internet-technologies, and that there is an up-tick when a novel stimulus is presented. This engenders chasing behaviors.
‘The result is that Internet-technology use mirrors the experience of stimulant use (and subsequent addiction) in a particularly striking manner. The pull one has to look at their phone or respond to a communication has a closer relationship to stimulant addiction behaviors than the drive to talk to someone face-to-face’.
But when do you know you’re addicted to the Internet? When does it become a problem? Does checking my email 30 times a day mean I’m an Internet addict?
Internet Addiction Is When…
To understand the effects of Internet addiction, we reached out to the reSTART Internet Addiction Treatment Program in Washington State. reSTART was founded in 2009 and is currently home to the only dedicated Internet and Gaming use program in the United States.
In a phone interview with Hilarie Cash, Ph.D., LMHC, CCO, and co-founder of Internet/Computer Addiction Services and the reSTART Internet Addiction Treatment Program, we asked when she thought Internet use becomes an addiction.
‘It’s at the point where it becomes compulsive’, she tells us. ‘The addiction now controls the individual, rather than the individual being able to control the behaviour. Addicts typically say ‘I’m not going to do that anymore‘ and then the cravings override the rational decision.
A rational thought but it’s overridden by the impulse, and that is typical of addiction.
‘If you’re a student in college and say ‘I’ve got to get my schoolwork done, I’ve got to get to class. I’m going to play for just an hour or two and then go to bed and sleep‘ — that’s a rational thought but it’s overridden by the impulse, and that is typical of addiction’.
Another leader in the Internet addiction treatment field is psychiatrist and colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, Tao Ran. His name might ring a bell because he’s been in the media over his Chinese ‘Internet boot camps‘ — the ones with military-style discipline for teens.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Ran gave his opinion on Internet addiction: ‘Internet addiction leads to problems in the brain similar to those derived from heroin consumption. But, generally, it is even more damaging. It destroys relationships and deteriorates the body without the person knowing. All of them have eyesight and back problems and suffer from eating disorders.
‘In addition, we have discovered that their brain capacity is reduced by eight percent, and the psychological afflictions are serious. If someone is spending six hours or more on the internet, we consider that to be an addiction’.
I’m Addicted, Now What?
Internet addictions aren’t taken as seriously as drug or alcohol abuse because the world wide web is seen as just a harmless tool in everyday life. But when that harmless tool becomes a harmful one, it’s time to take action.
Image via Wikipedia
We asked Hilarie Cash about the reSTART program and how they help Internet users battle with web addiction.
‘The first thing is to keep them away from digital media — put them on a digital fast — for a minimum of 45 days. The second thing is helping them think through and develop a plan which will be their blueprint of how to move forward post-reSTART, and have a healthy relationship with digital technology.
‘We have a strong emphasis on health, also. And so they are exercising and on a very rigorous fitness regime five days a week. They are eating healthy food and sleeping for 9 hours a night. All of that begins to restore and build their health, their stamina and their physical fitness.
‘All addicts are poor at regulating their emotional state, so we give them new skills on how to handle their emotions. We are teaching them social skills, communication skills and life skills’.
As to whether or not an Internet addict can fully recover, Cash is optimistic but points out that it also takes a lot of lifestyle changes to get over such an addiction.
‘I think people can recover from Internet addiction but, as with all addictions, you have to be very mindful in the ways the brain has been changed forever. Therefore, you as an addict are going to be forever vulnerable to relapse. So it really does require living a different lifestyle and you have to live life a different way in order to stay healthy and not be turned to addiction’.
I think people can recover from Internet addiction but, as with all addictions, you have to be very mindful in the ways the brain has been changed forever.
The Internet Isn’t Evil (No, Really!)
While it’s possible to become addicted to the net, it doesn’t necessarily mean using the Internet is all bad.
A 2008 study actually found that older adults who were first-time Internet users had their brain function boosted after just a week!
‘We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function’, said study author Dr. Gary Small.
Dr. Small is a professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. He’s also the author of iBrain, a compelling book about the impact of technology on the human brain (give it a read, it’s fascinating).
So while the Internet becomes a source of brain exercise to some, it can lead to nasty addictions in others. The solution? Probably what your parents always told you — everything in moderation… including visits to Lost At E Minor.
To learn more about Internet addiction, check out the PBS documentary Web Junkie. And learn more about the Internet addiction recovery services provided by reSTART here.
