Dopamine Makes Us Addicted To Seeking Information
whatmakesthemclick.net
whatmakesthemclick.net
s/dopamine/happy juice/ and the article has exactly the same information content. People like to throw around names of neurotransmitters in order to sound scientific. But to then claim a special connection between dopamine and 140 character messages is pseudoscience.
Thinking "I should do X, because the dopamine levels in my brain are changing" is probably going to be less effective and more ambiguous to you compared to thinking "When I click a link on news.yc I feel X, when I tell myself maybe I should stop ycing and work on something else I feel y, so maybe I could try z".
That is the opposite of what the article states, which is that behavioral reinforcement is distinct from pleasure. The point being that habit formation is strongly driven by processes other than euphoria [1], and that those processes can be characterized and understood.
[1] Novelty is important, especially the variable timing of repetition.
Dopamine, rewards, pleasure center of the brain -> http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/personal-developme...
Willpower research -> http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/will-power-how-to-...
Similarly, most meats in the wild are fit and lean, and you don't get concentrated fats(butter, cheese, cooking oils, etc.) either, leaving nuts as the largest likely fat source.
That doesn't mean that our new food sources are invalid, but one has to be aware that they're recent inventions, evolutionarily speaking, and deserve "occasional" use vs. "staple" status. Which is unfortunate considering that almost everything manufactured involves a concentration - "vegetable oil" (mostly soy and corn) appears all over, processed grain products are commonplace, and most of the items not using the first two are dosed with some combination of dairy fat, salt, and sugar. Between just those few ingredients, you can find the stimulating factors of almost everything on the market.
To expand, bananas may be relatively high sugar/energy compared to other natural foods (green vegetables), but they cannot compare with the super concentrated foods we have created such as Twinkies =)
PS. Is this article meant to be a case-in-point? It's written in bite-sized paragraphs with catchy subject sentences.
The problem with LeechBlock is that it only works with Firefox, and only if I choose to install it. I'm seeking out a system that I can install on my router so that I can block time-sinks on all my computers at once. My router runs Linux, so there must be a way.
I'd imagine some of the other firmwares out there can do it as well. Guess it comes down to what kind of router you have.
127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
Yes, Windows has one too.