What BlackBerry Addiction says About Obama's Brain

Enlarge

---

Related Content

related article

How Obama Won it With the Web

slideshow

How to Build a Brand Like Obama

related article

The Brand Called Obama

Obama may have won the election, but he’s about to lose his BlackBerry. During the campaign, Obama’s device was at his side more often than Joe Biden. Alas, change is coming: many expect that Obama will have to surrender his BlackBerry when he enters the Oval Office. We feel your pain, Barack. For many of us, going offline feels like cold turkey. Can email be addictive? Princeton University neuroscientist Sam Wang, co-author of Welcome to Your Brain, weighs in.

There’s been lots of news recently about Obama being addicted to his BlackBerry.

I can relate. If I’ve been on a plane and I can’t get email, my hands are kind of shaking.

Do you have a BlackBerry yourself?

I did for while but I actually gave it up. I started using it at inappropriate times. I started using it at the dinner table. My wife and I agreed that was pretty dysfunctional.

They don’t call it the CrackBerry for nothing. Can email be email addictive?

When people talk about addiction, clinicians usually mean a very particular phenomenon in which some artificial substance like alcohol, heroin or methamphetamine causes physical dependence with withdrawal and craving. Regular people mean something totally different when they say they’re addicted to chocolate, gardening, sailing or whatever. But those two things are believed to use the same circuitry and same neurochemical mechanisms in the brain.

It’s believed that when something rewarding happens—finding money on the sidewalk, seeing an old friend or finding chocolate on your pillow when you check into a hotel—it activates a reward signal that tells you something important has happened and that you should remember so you can do it again. Currently people believe that reward signal is the chemical dopamine. Addictive substances like cocaine or methamphetamine turn the reward knob up all the way and drive the reward circuitry beyond normal range.

Obviously, email doesn’t directly act upon brain circuitry. But we can easily become dependent on it they way we might become dependent on wanting chocolate. When people say they’re addicted to email, what they really mean is the want the reward and feel they need the reward. But it’s not addictive in the sense of cocaine or methamphetamine because those drugs trigger long term chemical changes that are extreme and out of normal range.

For most people, that’s not true with email. My guess is Obama might say he’s addicted to email, but honestly, he’s about to become a really busy guy. He has many ways of getting social reward.

Like standing on stage with tens of thousands of people cheering?

I’d be more worried about him if he decided to give up public speaking.

How can we tell when our email habit reaches the point of addiction?

The CAGE test is one of the inventories that physicians use to screen for alcoholism. It’s a four point test: Have you ever tried to cut down on your habit? Have your friends or loved ones ever annoyed you about usage? Do you ever feel guilty about your use? Do you ever find that first thing in the morning you need eye opener of email to get going? It’s been determined in published papers that if people answer yes to two or more of those, they have better than 50-50 chance of being an alcoholic.

Let’s turn the same questions to email. I say yes to all four. I once had lunch with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google and he says yes to all four. My coauthor, Sandra Aamodt, says yes to all four. We should be living in the gutter begging for kilobytes.

You really wouldn’t call me an addict—I wouldn’t rob banks or steal TVs to feed my email habit. But on the other hand, I like to have my email and often first thing in the morning. It would be interesting if Barack Obama answers yes to two or more of those. If he thinks he’s addicted, then he probably meets that technical definition. Thankfully for him, at a neurochemical level, he’s not really addicted.

When you gave up your BlackBerry, did you have any kind of withdrawal?

With different kinds of addiction, the duration of symptoms and cravings can last different amounts of time, depending on their chemical effect on the brain. In the case of chemical like methamphetamine, you can be irretrievably addicted and never get off. Most people can kick caffeine in one or two weeks. I find that when I go off email, I miss it in the short term but I basically lose my dependence in a few days.

Sometimes spending less time on email can make you more productive.