Stop smoking and talk about yourself? Lose weight by talking about yourself? Quit Alcoholics Anonymous and, right, talk about yourself. What is happening here?
Between 30 and 40 percent of everyday conversation consists of people talking about themselves. For online social media, that figure jumps to 80 percent. Evidently, without our counterparts in personal, real-world conversation being able to roll their eyes, groan or even say “stop” (in various ways, both polite and not-so-polite), we humans will just talk on and on about ourselves, a reality that has led to more than 1 billion people on Facebook, constantly updating what they have to say about themselves, and to Pinterest “pins,” providing users a way to visually “talk” about themselves.
A recent Harvard study revealed that sharing any information with others triggers a pleasurable neurochemical reaction in the brain but that sharing with others information about the self triggers an even larger shot of the neurochemical dopamine. For some time, scientists have known that such a physiological shot of pleasure accompanied winning food and having sex and that similar effects came from acquiring money. But this was the first study to prove that the body was particularly pleased and therefore offered larger rewards for something researchers called “self-disclosure.” That certainly gives a vote of confidence for the “quantified self” movement, which encourages individuals to monitor their activities and vital signs and to share their data with others.
Meanwhile, other researchers have focused on what they call “addiction transfer.” For instance, many patients who have undergone gastric bypass surgery to suppress eating and control obesity have subsequently become addicted to something other than food, such as drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and the like. Pursuing that curiosity, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Maryland have discovered that the body has specific receptors to control the release of dopamine. Many people have fewer such receptors and thus are able to get addicted to activities that prompt the brain to unrelentingly release the neurochemical. In other word, when denied access to one kind of addiction that triggers a dopamine fix, those short of the control receptor transfer to something else that can supply the pleasure shot.
And so, now that we know talking about ourselves can trigger the dopamine shot, researchers might have inadvertently discovered another kind of “talking cure,” the name typically applied to psychotherapy. The 80 percent of social-media conversations that focus on “self-disclosure” suggest that this new form of talking cure might be successful. Is society really OK with a wild spread of social-media addiction? Facebook stockholders certainly hope so.
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