The evolutionary reason why you love Black Friday

hello brain lovers black friday it's almost that time of the year again a huge mass of potential buyers will flood walls and shops all over the country and online also again in a collective buying frenzy triggered by the media and savvy marketeers this is definitely an emergency as used as we have become to this annual ritual still have you ever wondered how they do it why we do it what is it that triggers us so that we're all struck with acute consumerism and we turn into some sort of weird buying zombie army the answer of

course is in our brain that beautiful brain of ours that is still in so many ways operating as if we were living 200 000 years ago somewhere on the african plains or forty thousand years ago hiding from the cold in european caves our environment and our needs did not evolve that much and in terms of evolution 200 000 years is a blink of an eye [Music] nothing much really changes so our ancestors were hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years we've done only that hunting and gathering our brain internalized that it was hugely important not

only to be good at it but simply to do it without it no food without food well it was quickly game over right so evolution gave us a very strong motivational mechanism to make sure we would perform that act of hunting and gathering and as always it's brilliant in its simplicity you see in order to make us hunt and gather evolution made us like it there's another entrance this way yes as simply as that we like it how do you ask well i have one word for you dopamine glopamine is a chemical a neurotransmitter it's

linked to pleasure and rewards it's extremely powerful [Music] it's so powerful it leads to addictions think cocaine gambling sex and so on but it doesn't always have to be it's also in the little things you know those guilty pleasures we enjoy so much have you ever tried filling your mouth with chocolate that taste of melting chocolate that's pure dopamine or trying to solve a puzzle or a problem and then finding the solution we gotta find a way to make this fit into the hole for this using nothing but that dopamine well in the case of

our caveman a successful hunt of finding a spot with a lot of berries for example would have our brain release dopamine and in today's world it's no wonder that millions of people got hooked a couple of years ago on hunting pokemons all for that matter hunting a great deal on black friday right it's still the same process that is active now when looking for the best deal our brain processes this in the exact same way as if we were hunting mammoths including the high heartbeat feverish tension the adrenaline rushing through our veins and when we

find our prey and we go in for the kill or in this case paying with our credit card well there's the blessed dopamine flooding our neurons yeah let's have some fun ladies start your angels making us feel oh so thankful but also wanting for more because remember dopamine is the root of all addictions and and once we get going it's hard to stop at one point during one of their crazy experiments researchers connected the brain of a rat to a lever so that each time the rat would push the lever he would get a release

of dopamine in his brain well there was also another lever next to it and this one was releasing food a long story short to their consternation the researchers observed how the rat would rather continue pushing the dopamine lever and die from starvation rather than take a break and eat that's also dopamine and it makes you think well maybe it's a good thing there's only one black friday a year hey happy bargain hunting everyone and don't forget to like and subscribe check out some of our other episodes and if you want the real thing go to

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