In 2016, a neurobiologist puts mice in a cage with a button. When they press this button, a sensor stimulates their brain to release dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure. Each time a mouse presses the button, it takes an instant shot of joy.
Dopamine allows us to feel the pleasure of an orgasm or eating chocolate. The brain loves this substance so much that if it understands that eating chocolate equals pleasure, it can become addicted. Quickly, mice become addicted to the button.
They want to receive more and more shots, to the point that they no longer think about sleeping, eating, drinking, reproducing. If scientists hadn't taken them out of their cages, mice would be dead. Happy.
The only thing that mattered to them was to press the button. Now imagine that every time a mouse in the world presses a button, someone makes money. There is plenty to become very rich.
This is the dream of all companies whose economy is based on your attention. Create a strong enough need and an inoffensive appearance for these consumers to get high without even realizing it. And no one has ever managed to do it like TikTok.
One billion users spend an average of an hour and a half a day on the app, because they are addicted to what it does to their brain. Each swipe on TikTok releases the same shot of dopamine that pushed mice to let themselves die. TikTok managed to put a button in our pocket.
This video is in collaboration with CleanMyMac X, a software developed by MacPaw. MacPaw is a Ukrainian company that creates software that simplifies digital life. They are therefore obviously fans of Apple products.
They have been developing CleanMyMac for 14 years, which is a Swiss knife for cleaning, securing, optimizing and accelerating your Mac by cleaning the machine in depth. In one click, smart analysis examines the system to detect invisible cache files, incomplete downloads, hidden files, malicious software and optimization problems. The Telescope tool creates an interactive cartography of the entire computer to visualize the integrity of the files that fill the hard drive and make room in a few seconds.
And to monitor the health of your Mac, CleanMyMac constantly lives in your menu bar and gives you access to information on storage that can be released, potential threats and machine consumption. This is the app that I install first when I unpack a new Mac because I hate spending time in the Finder looking for files that take up space and it is important to clean it so that it retains optimal performance. If you don't use it already, there is a good chance that your Mac needs it.
You can test the free version by clicking on the link in the description. Thanks to CleanMyMac X for supporting the channel this year. The economic model of a social network is based on one thing, attention.
We don't give money to use a social network. We pay it with the hours of sleep that we don't find and the time we spend putting things back later. Its job is to identify the vulnerabilities of human psychology and to find ways to exploit it to absorb as much attention as possible.
And it spends billions for that. Each network has developed its own algorithm, a set of computer rules that chooses which content to show you according to your consumption habits. They have been fighting for years to develop the best algorithm, the one that will be able to identify the content you want to see the most precisely.
And it works. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram are addictive platforms, but none have succeeded in being like TikTok. Yet TikTok doesn't have a better algorithm than the others, but it is better used.
When you arrive on YouTube, you have to choose a video among the dozens of thumbnails that are offered to you. And most of the time, they are heads and themes that you already know, because your experience is based on the content on which your curiosity pushed you to click. TikTok's design is the opposite of that.
The second you open the app, you are already consuming the content it has chosen for you. They have made the consumption of content automatic and instantaneous, by reducing the number of choices you have to make to one, that of moving on to the next video. A swipe up and you are in front of a dance.
Another and you look at an animal doing something funny. Then the sketch of a comedian. And ten minutes later, you are still sitting on the toilets and you haven't seen time go by, because you had no conscious choice to make while you were infinitely sent short and stimulating content to test your centers of interest.
When you use the app for the first time, it's obvious. Each swipe from one content to another seems to refine even more the themes we show you. TikTok's strength is that as it imposes content on you, it can test you in every way to understand who you are.
It analyzes your location, your contact information, your history, how long you watch a video before moving on to the next, if you liked it, if you spent time reading comments, if you followed the creator and if you sent it to someone. In a few hours, it identifies your musical tastes, your sense of humor, your sexual orientation and the state of your mental health. Your experience does not revolve around the content you were looking for or the creators you follow.
It revolves around who you are. All the time you spend on the app, you train it to understand you in the page they obviously called For you. TikTok is better than the others because by forcing the users' curiosity, it puts all the chances on its side.
In the event that you come across something you love watching, you take a shot of dopamine. In the event that you come across a content you would never have clicked on but that you appreciate, an unexpected shot of dopamine, even stronger. Because it plays on the fact that an unpredictable reward causes greater activity in the brain regions of reward than the one we see coming.
And in the event that you come across something you don't like, well, a shot of dopamine anyway. People who are addicted to casino machines don't do it because they win every time. They do it because by pulling the lever, they can win the jackpot or nothing.
It's hope that holds them back. And that makes the gambling machines bring more money to the United States than baseball, cinema and amusement parks combined. The more variable the reward, the stronger the addiction.
Addiction starts when your brain identifies the signal of your index that swipes up and the extracts of music that it had left in a loop in its subconscious as a source of dopamine. Once it gets used to the reward associated with these signals, it learns to anticipate the release of dopamine and it produces it before even a video has time to please you. One last swipe and you could take an even more intense shot of dopamine than the previous one.
But as it is an infinite flow of content, there is never really a last swipe. The study of a professor has shown that it was possible to push people to continue eating soup by giving them a bowl without a bottom that fills up as it empties. The difference is that if your stomach is able to tell you that you have eaten enough soup, your brain does not know the feeling of satiety.
The more you watch TikTok, the more it takes a liking to this spike of dopamine, the less effective they are, the more it needs fast and frequent doses. From there, any activity that does not consist of going from a spike of dopamine to another in the space of a few seconds, offering instant gratification, will seem to you to last an eternity. You will lose the motivation to seek a reward in the long run.
If addiction is associated with mental health disorders, anxiety and depression, it is because it leaves no room for your future. You will lose the concentration necessary to read, work, watch a movie, spend time without a screen with your loved ones, you will gradually lose the ability to think. The dependence on a social network goes far beyond what we imagine.
It fills a void in our lives that we will never be able to fill otherwise, because its effects are long-term. Studies have established that the tendency to dependence and the overload of dopamine are at the origin of the death of brain cells. The more you are exposed to this free dopamine, the more stupid you are.
It's very serious. The overload of this neurotransmitter in the brain makes you lose creativity and makes you make more stupid decisions. Because your subconscious is busy watching dancing teenagers and that it no longer has enough brain space to fully function, which ultimately reduces the width of the mental band which is at the origin of your decisions.
And the less you are able to make smart decisions, the more your brain will turn towards what it already knows. If you send the signal to your brain that it is TikTok that makes you happy, it enters a chemical cycle that strengthens itself. And as soon as you get bored during the day, you open TikTok, no longer by lack of discipline, but by brain reflex.
You suffer the same symptoms as an alcoholic or toxicomaniac person. But no one will worry because the votes are not physical, they only happen in your head. The role of dopamine is to reward us for each stage of life.
It ensures that every day we spend working on our goals gives us the feeling of worth it. It is not only the language of pleasure, it is the language of motivation. If the needs of your brain in dopamine are filled by the consumption of foreign videos on an application, there is no longer any reason to try to do anything else to make you happy.
The internal dispute that you feel between your heart, which is aware that you are not doing what you want to do with your life, and your brain, which seems to not understand it, is due to the fact that it was up to you to tell it what makes you wake up in the morning. And you failed. Because it had the plans, TikTok has allowed to redirect the cables of your brain so that it believes that your happiness rests on it.
With one billion active users, it has settled in the minds of 12% of the world's population. Mainly young people who will never find their cognitive capacity because the prefrontal cortex, which plays a role in emotions, motivation, decision-making and memory, is not fully formed before 25 years. So I believe that instead of worrying about the progress of artificial intelligence, we would better worry about the decline of ours, hoping that it is not too late to save it.
If you spend hours every day, it is not because you are lazy. It is because by playing on the flaws of your main engine, your brain is being pushed to come back to it. So no need to blame yourself, but it is necessary that you regain control.
Good luck. Thank you all. Thanks to CleanMyMac.
It was Leo Duff.
