Kerby Anderson

We all know how addictive these digital devices might be, but I was surprised to see an article in the New York Post describing it as “digital heroin.” The author is a doctor at one of the country’s top rehabs and also served as a clinical professor at Stony Brook Medicine. What he says in the article is shocking.

We now know that these digital devices (iPads, smartphones, and Xboxes) are a form of a digital drug. All you have to do is look at some of the brain imaging to see how these devices are affecting the brain’s frontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that controls executive functioning, including impulse control.

We also know that these devices raise dopamine levels (the feel-good neurotransmitter), which involves the addiction dynamic. In fact, scientists have found that they can raise these levels as high as when people engage in sex.

One doctor who serves as the director of neuroscience at UCLA calls these screens “electronic cocaine.” Chinese researchers call them “digital heroin.” The head of addiction research for the Pentagon and the U.S. Navy has been researching video game addiction and calls the games and screen technologies “digital pharmakeia” (the Greek word for drug).

Of course, you don’t have to know much about neurophysiology to suspect there is a problem. Many parents wonder if these glowing screens are having a negative effect on their kids. They see aggressive temper tantrums and short attention spans. The few brave enough to take these devices from their kids even see them going through withdrawal.

The author has treated over 1,000 teens for digital addiction. He has found that treatment is very difficult once a child has crossed into addiction. In fact, he has “found it easier to treat heroin and crystal meth addicts than lost-in-the-matrix video gamers or Facebook-dependent social media addicts.” We shouldn’t be surprised that some call these devices “digital heroin.”