Irresistible - Adam Alter - Review
About four decades back, the predominant hooks ranged between cigarettes, alcohol and drugs, maybe even a game of cards on a lighter level. However, during the digital age, the common man is exposed to instagram, facebook, amazon shopping, email, netflix and the list is practically endless. To compound the problem, digital media over the years has evolved to provide a deeply addictive experience, it's important to note that user attention is the new currency. As per 2024 statistics, over 19 countries including India, use the smartphone on an average of 4 hours and 30 minutes everyday. To sum up, the environment and circumstances are overwhelmingly conducive for digital media addiction than ever before.
Before we dig deeper, let’s define addiction, it’s a non-functional repetitive act whose short term benefits are far outweighed by long term damages. In another angle, addiction can be the consequence of unmet psychological needs, which a set of repetitive acts assuages them in the short term. Well, how is addiction different from compulsion, while the former has an immediate reward which acts as a positive reinforcement, the latter can be an unpleasant experience but there exists a relief in completing the act, which is a negative reinforcement.
Adam introduces us to the harmful impact of smartphone addiction and then draws a parallel with alternative forms of addiction in different eras as well. For instance, the US government had a huge problem in the 1971 Vietnam war when 51% of the armed forces had smoked marijuana, 31 % had used psychedelics also known as hallucinogens and an additional 28% had taken hard drugs, such as cocaine and heroin. The core reason for indulging in substance addictions can be attributed to the presence of extended period of peace time combined with easy availability of drugs. Many of the soldiers had to be put into rehabilitation centers in the US and the surprising element is that just 5% of them relapsed to drugs. The reason being the shift to a clean and drug free US environment meant that there is no scope for temptation to arise.
There are reasons why addiction is hard to overcome and the case of betel nut consumption highlights the same. Consuming betel nuts dilates blood vessels and lightens the mood, in a way it provides a moderate psychic effect. But the teeth rottens with frequent consumption which is defended by consumers as a practice to maintain good oral sanitary conditions. Truly a compulsive and contradicting defense against an addiction.
In a neurological observation between drug abusers and game addicts, patterns of neurons firing across the brain was found to be similar between the two groups, thereby activating the same reward center. The difference between the two can be a relatively stronger response to drugs but Adam’s comparison is certainly valid.
A threat to the society is children’s high consumption of smartphone for games or digital content, there are clear evidences that excessive use leads to inability to form real relationships or even strike a conversation outside the virtual world. Take the feral case of Oxana Malaya, the girl who was brought up by dogs between the age of 3 to 8 years. For a long time, she was four-footed and could hardly learn a language or useful skill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mcWv_HwBKM
During the childhood stage, a million neurological connections are made every second post which the brain progresses into pruning the brain circuits. If feral cases are difficult to normalize, then it’s an indication that smartphone addiction will have it’s own range of negative consequences as well. It's crucial to replace digital exposure with maybe a game of lego.
In case of unavoidable circumstances leading to exposure of digital content, screen to reality bridging becomes essential. It means children are compulsively exposed to similar real life characters which were witnessed in digital form. So now the child learns to understand the difference in context of observing a dog in a cartoon episode versus the same animal in real life.
Habit forms due to a 3 step loop, the first step is cue, leading to a behaviour which provides a reward at the end of the act. One of the approaches is to replace the bad behaviour with the good one on getting triggered by a cue. Basically, the addict has to pick a different positive behaviour that can provide a reasonable reward as well. Without a doubt it's easier said than done.
Downscaling insteading of going cold turkey is another option, for example nicotine gums works by providing smaller dosages of nicotine which can control the side effects of withdrawal symptoms.
Pavlok is an interesting device to break bad habits and eventually form good ones, the electrical stimuli providing hardware combined with an app to track progress can be an ideal combination. The wrist device can be used to give the consumer a slight shock whenever a bad habit is committed, it’s an aversion therapy that helps the brain associate a certain habit with painful experience.
There are demetricators available for facebook, instagram, twitter and other popular social media apps. It basically hides the like, comment or share metric thereby numbs the dopamine spike when someone shares their content on the respective social media apps. Eventually neutralising the temptation to check smartphones frequently.
Adam also provides an interesting disarming technique to defang end of episode cliffhangers which leads to binge watching. Webseries provides a chain of cliffhangers across multiple episodes to keep the viewers hooked. A cliffhanger is the creation of a suspense event, which can be an unknown masked killer or the protagonist’s slip down a steep hill, the resolution predominantly lies in the beginning of the next episode.
Given the current digital age, explosion of addictive social media content and the forthcoming virtual reality platforms which is bound to provide immersive experience, Adam Alter’s Irresistible will certainly mark itself as a must read and highly relevant book for a wide diaspora.
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