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How Instagram Hacks Your Brain
Subtitles (274 segments)
Hi. I’m Hank Green and I’m addicted to social media.
Or maybe I have a social media use disorder.
Whatever you call it, my relationship with social media is not positive.
And, yes, social media is addictive.
But like any addiction, it’s not my fault.
Social media is designed to hack my internal reward system
and get me to check in pretty much constantly.
Researchers know that social media
and our brains have a messy relationship.
But if you can stay away from it long enough to watch this video,
you’ll at least know how that relationship works
and how those researchers suggest we can improve it.
[intro music]
When I post something on Instagram, YouTube, or even LinkedIn,
I’ll admit I’m chasing that high of the all important “like.”
The human brain loves “likes”
because they activate the same pathways
as seeing money hit your bank on pay day
and hearing a compliment from a friend.
It feels good to get people’s tiny digital hearts,
or thumbs up…or whatever they use on LinkedIn.
But likes aren’t a one way street.
It turns out when you give someone else’s post a like,
that also activates some of the same brain bits.
This is according to a study published in 2018,
which featured 58 young people getting their brains scanned
by an MRI machine
while they participated in a social media experiment.
To help control this experiment,
the researchers designed a sort of fake version of Instagram
for the participants to use.
While inside the MRI,
participants scrolled and liked photos at will.
Then after they got out, they rated the photos they had just seen
on a 7-point scale.
Once the researchers did all their fancy stats,
they were able to show that if you take an MRI image of someone’s brain…
and know that someone is looking at a picture on fake Instagram…
urately predict how much they actually like that picture.
So there’s some defined neural activity associated with liking Instagram photos.
And this activity is similar to what we know happens in your brain
when you engage in other rewarding behaviors,
like accomplishing a goal or eating your favorite snack.
But social media can have more power than merely tickling your reward centers.
The way you engage with it can also change your brain’s reward pathways
in addictive ways.
It’s called Social Networking Site addiction,
and it involves dependence, withdrawal, relapse, tolerance,
and other addictive responses.
People who are addicted to social media obsessively use these sites
to the point that it gets in the way of the rest of their lives.
It has a lot in common with other addictions,
although you might not have heard of it,
in part because not all experts agree it’s a thing.
But a solid portion of them use this terminology,
Full subtitles available in the video player
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