{"id":10244,"date":"2014-02-25T13:31:47","date_gmt":"2014-02-25T21:31:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/?p=10244"},"modified":"2017-04-25T04:16:57","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T11:16:57","slug":"legal-heroin-is-virtual-reality-our-next-hard-drug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2014\/02\/legal-heroin-is-virtual-reality-our-next-hard-drug","title":{"rendered":"Legal Heroin: Is Virtual Reality Our Next Hard Drug?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"Posts by Steven Kotler\" href=\"http:\/\/singularityhub.com\/author\/skotler\/\" rel=\"author\">Steven Kotler<\/a> \u2014 Singularity Hub<br \/>\n<br \/> So video games are addictive\u2014this we know.<\/p>\n<p>It comes down to dopamine, one of the brain\u2019s basic signaling molecules. Emotionally, we feel dopamine as pleasure, engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. It\u2019s released whenever we take risks, or encounter novelty. From an evolutionary standpoint, it reinforces exploratory behavior.<\/p>\n<p>More importantly, dopamine is a motivator. It\u2019s released when we have the expectation of reward. And once this neurotransmitter becomes hardwired into a psychological reward loop, the desire to get more of that reward becomes the brain\u2019s overarching preoccupation. Cocaine, widely considered the most addictive drug on the planet, does little more than flood the brain with dopamine and block its reuptake (sort of like SSRI\u2019s block the reuptake of serotonin).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2014\/02\/24\/legal-heroin-is-virtual-reality-our-next-hard-drug\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steven Kotler \u2014 Singularity Hub So video games are addictive\u2014this we know. It comes down to dopamine, one of the brain\u2019s basic signaling molecules. Emotionally, we feel dopamine as pleasure, engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. It\u2019s released whenever we take risks, or encounter novelty. From [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1879],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-virtual-reality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10244"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47212,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10244\/revisions\/47212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}