Advisory Note: If you manage to read this article to the end — without switching tabs, checking your phone, or giving in to the impulse to scroll — congratulations. You are still salvageable. Most people don’t make it this far. Dopamine doesn’t allow it. Every notification is a hook; every sound, an invisible command. Few resist the chemical call of distraction. If you’re still here, it’s because something in you still rebels against conditioning. There is still silence between one stimulus and the next — and it is in that interval that freedom breathes. Keep going. But know this: the more you understand what you read, the more clearly you’ll see the chains the world has disguised as pleasure.
“Panem et circenses” — Juvenal (Satires, Satire X – 100–127 A.D.)
31 min.
Maurício Pinheiro
Control is no longer imposed through pain, but through reward. Dopamine sustains a new kind of social control — silent, pleasurable, and absolute. The body thrills, the brain rejoices, and freedom dissolves.
There were no tanks in the streets. No soldiers standing guard, no authoritarian voice echoing through loudspeakers. No order imposed by force. The surrender of human race will was subtler: it happened in silence — chemical, sweet, perfect. While we searched for visible enemies — governments, corporations, ideologies — someone discovered the shortcut inward. The most complete conquest in history was not achieved through pain, but through pleasure. Dopamine — that tiny molecule once meant to reward us for learning, creating, and surviving — has become the invisible link between pleasure and obedience.
Like an unseen thread — light as air and strong as steel — dopamine has bound the human mind, turning desire itself into a tool of control. Each touch, each notification, each “like” is a crumb of reward, a drop of pleasure that trains the brain to crave more. The video, the “like,” the next click — all are carefully calibrated bursts, chemical microdoses administered with algorithmic precision. The infinite scroll and autoplay functions work like digital syringes, injecting tailor-made pleasure at controlled intervals, keeping the brain in a perpetual state of anticipation and reward.
Dopamine (3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine) is an organic molecule produced in the brain from the amino acid tyrosine, which is found in many protein-rich foods. Tyrosine serves as the biochemical raw material for the natural production of this neurotransmitter linked to pleasure and motivation. Among the foods richest in tyrosine are aged cheeses — especially Parmesan — which can contain about 2 grams of tyrosine per 100 grams of product. In fact, the tiny white crystals visible on Parmesan flakes are composed of this very amino acid. Inside certain neurons — the dopaminergic neurons — tyrosine undergoes two rapid transformations: first, it is converted into a substance called L-DOPA; then, L-DOPA is transformed into dopamine. When a neuron releases dopamine, the molecule crosses a small gap between nerve cells known as the synapse. On the other side, dopamine fits into specific receptors that act like chemical locks — called D1, D2, and similar types. Upon binding to these receptors, dopamine sends a signal of pleasure, motivation, or movement — depending on the region of the brain involved. Soon after, this signal must end quickly for the system to stay balanced. Therefore, dopamine is reabsorbed and broken down by special enzymes that clear away the excess within seconds. This delicate balance is essential: the brain needs brief bursts of dopamine to sustain desire and curiosity, but it cannot live in a constant state of euphoria. When the system is overstimulated — by drugs, gambling, pornography, social media, or any other modern addiction — the brain adapts, reducing its sensitivity and demanding ever greater stimulation to feel the same pleasure. This is how the natural reward system turns into chemical or behavioral dependence.
The human brain evolved for scarcity, not abundance. Our ancestors lived between effort and silence. Dopamine was once an ally of survival: it lit up when the hunt succeeded, when danger was overcome, when the tribe endured and shared the meat. Each brief surge of this molecule carried a biological message — the effort was worth it; repeat it. It was a simple and wise system, finely tuned to reward persistence, learning, and cooperation. A biological compass designed to reinforce effort and teach endurance.
But the same circuit that once taught humankind to hunt also made it vulnerable to the trap of excess. Now, the reward is instant. What was once a spark of survival has become a continuous blaze. Captured and domesticated, that ancient inner compass has turned into the mechanism of a new regime — not political, but chemical.
A regime in which power no longer needs to coerce when it can seduce, and where pleasure, as abundant as air, has become the quietest of prisons. The body reacts, the brain rejoices — and freedom dissolves without a sound, like sugar in warm water.
There are no tyrants, only circuits and algorithms; no prisons, only habits. Thus, what we once called will becomes reflex, what we once called choice becomes conditioning. Chemistry has taken the throne — and we, content and dulled, have become livestock. Chemically dominated, we keep applauding, smiling all the while.
Digital platforms exploit this with surgical precision, offering rapid bursts of dopamine that reinforce compulsive behaviors. With each stimulus, the brain learns to crave more. Dopamine is released every time something pleasurable happens — listening to music, receiving a compliment, or seeing a new notification. This natural mechanism, when repeated excessively, creates a cycle of constant pursuit. Pleasure ceases to be an end and becomes an addiction. We no longer seek the experience itself, but the chemical spark.
Dopamine, which was meant to serve life, begins to command it — turning the brain into a reward machine. Neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz demonstrated that dopamine fires more intensely in anticipation of a reward than in the reward itself. This constant anticipation is the core of modern addiction — the promise of something better, always just a tap away. That is why scrolling a feed is as addictive as pulling the lever of a slot machine.
“The real revolution will be moral, not political. The tyrant of the future will not need chains, only pleasures.” — Aldous Huxley, on the theme of Brave New World (1932)
Daniel Lieberman, in The Molecule of More, defines dopamine as the molecule of the “not yet” — the fuel of desire and perpetual dissatisfaction. It drives us to pursue what is missing but rarely allows us to appreciate what we already have. Guided by this restless chemistry, the human being has become a modern hunter, in constant pursuit of the next stimulus.
The problem does not lie in the molecule itself, but in the engineering that hijacked it. Dopamine has been converted into a tool of social control, domesticated to serve the attention economy. The old economy of production has given way to the economy of pleasure, where profit is measured in clicks, dopamine, and dependency. Advertising masters this logic with precision — crafting messages that directly trigger the dopaminergic circuit, turning consumerism into a biological reflex.
Dopamine functions as the source code of motivation — the chemical messenger that translates desire into action. It is produced in two deep regions of the brain: the substantia nigra pars compacta and the ventral tegmental area (VTA). From there, it travels along pathways known as the mesolimbic and mesocortical routes, weaving a bridge between the limbic system — responsible for emotions — and the prefrontal cortex, where reasoning, planning, and conscious decisions are formed. This connection is essential: the limbic system detects what is emotionally significant — an opportunity, a risk, a potential pleasure — while the prefrontal cortex determines how and when to act. Dopamine is the biochemical link between these two worlds. It translates emotional impulse into cognitive purpose, transforming simple wanting into strategy, effort, and goal-directed behavior. When the dopaminergic signal reaches the nucleus accumbens, the sensation of reward and satisfaction emerges — the brain’s way of acknowledging that an action “was worth it.” This message reinforces neural circuits, imprinting learning — a mechanism that, in balance, drives the body and stimulates curiosity, creativity, and progress. But the same system that sustains motivation can, when unbalanced, imprison the individual in automatic cycles of pleasure-seeking. In excess, dopamine ceases to be the engine of discovery and becomes the trigger of compulsion: the brain begins to chase the stimulus rather than the meaning.
Let us look at some concrete examples. Modern gyms have become true dopaminergic temples — spaces where the physical and the digital pleasures blur. Moving bodies, sweating faces, pounding music, and triumphant selfies compose a perfectly synchronized chemical ritual. Exercise, once a path to health and balance, has turned into a neurobiological spectacle: every repetition, every “like,” every glance in the mirror activates the reward circuit.
Sex, too, has been captured by this logic. In dating apps, touch has become a number, intimacy a transaction. Pleasure is instant, disposable, solitary — a conditioned reflex fueled by algorithms. The chemical orgasm has replaced human connection; desire has ceased to be encounter and become programmed interaction.
Obesity, in turn, represents the other extreme of this same dopaminergic mechanism. According to the WHO, more than 1 billion people today live with obesity — about 16% of the adult population. Ultra-processed foods are engineered like drugs: precise combinations of sugar, fat, and salt produce dopamine spikes similar to those triggered by psychoactive substances. Eating has ceased to be nourishment and become anesthesia. Dopamine, which once rewarded the hunter for survival, now rewards the consumer for compulsion.
“It is not necessary to imprison bodies when one can capture minds.” — Aldous Huxley, summarizing the concept of social control in Brave New World.
Dopamine has also turned thought into reflex — and with that, inaugurated an era of collective cognitive dullness. The constant flood of stimuli erodes the brain’s noblest functions: focus, memory, abstraction, patience. What was once a mind capable of sustaining complex ideas is now a fragmented mosaic of instant reactions. Thinking has become exhausting. Waiting, intolerable. And feeling — however superficially — is the only verb left.
ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) is more than a clinical diagnosis: it is the mirror of a society whose dopaminergic system is in collapse. The disorder, marked by an incessant search for novelty and an inability to sustain attention, reflects a brain that no longer finds pleasure in prolonged focus. But what was once pathology has now become the norm. Digital platforms — engineered to trigger dopamine with every swipe — have turned the typical behavior of ADHD into a cultural standard.
As Byung-Chul Han suggests in The Burnout Society (Die Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, 2010), we live in a world where the overabundance of stimuli erodes both the soul and the capacity for attention.
Everyone — but especially the young — lives in a state of fragmented hyperattention, oscillating between multiple stimuli without ever lingering on any of them. Unable to endure boredom or silence, they frantically seek the next flash of novelty, as if every second of calm were a threat. Emptiness, boredom, and idleness — once the cradles of reflection and creativity — have become intolerable experiences. What was once a fertile pause is now perceived as a danger.
Silence — that territory where thought matures — has been turned into a chemical enemy, something to be drowned out with sounds, images, and incessant stimuli. Human attention has been colonized. The modern mind — saturated with dopamine and conditioned by algorithms — thinks less, feels more, and reacts incessantly, oscillating between aggression and depression, between the urge to fight and the impulse to flee, cloaked in a quiet contempt for the world. It lives doped and distracted, anesthetized by microbursts of digital pleasure. It is a humanity of busy minds and empty spirits, mistaking movement for progress, and stimulus for meaning.
ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) is perhaps the most emblematic symptom of the age of dopaminergic enslavement. This disorder, associated with a functional deficit in dopamine pathways, undermines the ability to maintain focus, delay rewards, and sustain prolonged effort. In other words, the ADHD brain constantly seeks new, fast, and intense stimuli — a biological way of compensating for its low baseline level of dopamine.
But in contemporary society, this neurochemical profile has ceased to be the exception and has become the model. Digital platforms, with their short videos, infinite feeds, and constant notifications, artificially replicate the internal environment of ADHD, conditioning everyone to behave like hyper-attentive yet unfocused minds. We now live in a collectivization of distraction, where the average human brain is trained to respond like that of someone with chronic dopaminergic deficiency.
The irony is brutal: the same neurotransmitter that, in balance, makes us productive and creative, when manipulated in excess, turns us into restless beings, incapable of pause or reflection. ADHD, once a clinical diagnosis, has become a precise metaphor for a civilization drugged by urgency — a humanity in deficit of silence.
Intelligence has given way to emotional doping: quick responses, easy certainties, instant opinions. Complex reasoning — which demands effort and discomfort — has been replaced by chemical and visceral reactions. The civilization of the quick click is a civilization of numbed minds, where the great majority of the population is ignorant, shallow, and impulsive — a vast laboratory of collective conditioning in which pleasure has replaced thought and speed has abolished wisdom.
According to global data from 2025, the average human spends 6 hours and 45 minutes per day in front of screens — nearly half of their waking life. This immersion in constant stimuli reduces the synaptic density of brain areas associated with attention and decision-making. The result is the chemical atrophy of intelligence — a slow process of cognitive degeneration that threatens collective lucidity. Critical thinking withers; the brain, once an instrument of creation, becomes an organ of consumption.
“Dopamine is the molecule of more. It doesn’t reward what we have, but what we seek.” — Daniel Z. Lieberman, The Molecule of More (2018)
Politics understood this before science did. Polarization is the new collective addiction. Recent studies show that the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens — regions linked to pleasure and reward — are activated when a person reads opinions that confirm their beliefs. Every alarming headline, every invented enemy, every digital outburst triggers a burst of dopamine. The citizen no longer deliberates — they vibrate. Hatred has become entertainment, and politics, a mass drug. The citizen has become livestock.
Dopamine also explains why faith and ideology resist reasoning: believing is more pleasurable than doubting. Media-based religions and populisms of both the right and the left operate as chemical platforms of belonging. They offer ready-made certainty, immediate relief, dopaminergic comfort. Thought is slow and demands energy; fanaticism is fast and rewarding.
“The new totalitarianism is algorithmic.” — Yuval Noah Harari
The psychiatrist Anna Lembke, in Dopamine Nation, describes with surgical precision the paradox of modern pleasure: the more we seek stimulation, the less we are able to feel it. Faced with excess, the brain tries to protect itself — it reduces the number of dopaminergic receptors, in a process of desensitization. The result is cruel: the more pleasure one seeks, the less one finds. When natural pleasure fades, what remains is anhedonia — the inability to enjoy simplicity, to feel joy in ordinary things — and it often leads to depression. It is the oscillation between euphoria and apathy that, along with ADHD, defines the psychiatry of the twenty-first century: people excited yet empty, connected yet isolated, doped yet depressed. Dazed and confused!
“Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), argues that the most dangerous form of social control is not that imposed by pain, but rather that which is achieved through the excess of pleasure and constant distraction, echoing Huxley’s concern.”es to Death (1985)
None of this is accidental. Psychologist B. F. Skinner, in his experiments with rats and pigeons, demonstrated that unpredictable rewards — the so-called intermittent reinforcement — sustain behaviors far longer than regular ones. It’s the same logic now applied to social networks, games, and digital platforms: the user never knows when the next like, message, or notification will come, and that’s why they can’t stop. Each scroll is a lever; each like, a dose.
Decades before Skinner, Ivan Pavlov had conditioned dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell — even without food. Today, we salivate at the sound of a notification. Pavlovian conditioning has been updated: the bell became a ping, the food a like. Instinct, once biological, has become a commodity.
“In line with Jung’s ideas about the power of affects over logos, it can be said that ’emotion is the opium of reason’.”
And if Pavlov’s laboratory was small, ours is planetary. We live inside a vast real-time behavioral experiment, where billions of minds are conditioned by sounds, lights, and intermittent rewards. John B. Calhoun’s Universe 25 (see my article on Universe 25) is the perfect metaphor for this chemical dystopia: in his experiment, mice surrounded by abundance and comfort gradually lost their sense of purpose. First, they abandoned care for their offspring; then, social cooperation; and finally, they sank into apathy, isolation, and self-destruction. Overpopulation and overstimulation corroded their psychic structure until collapse.
Today, we repeat the same script — only with Wi-Fi. The excess of comfort, pleasure, and dopamine has turned society into a digital Universe 25, where hyperconnectivity disguises loneliness and abundance breeds despair. A symbolic mirror of our time, in which humanity — surrounded by everything — begins to wither from within. Excess kills meaning. Absolute comfort dissolves instinct. And, as in Calhoun’s experiments, we have become a well-fed and narcotized species, oscillating between satisfied apathy and the defensive aggression of instinct.
“Todas as vantagens do cristianismo e do álcool, sem nenhum dos seus defeitos.” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
Aldous Huxley foresaw with prophetic precision the chemical fate of freedom in Brave New World (1932). In the world he imagined, control was not imposed through pain but through pleasure; not through censorship, but through distraction. Soma — the drug of perfect happiness — eliminated suffering, but also doubt, introspection, and critical thought. It was the chemical paradise of conformity: a society where no one was unhappy, and precisely for that reason, no one was free.
Huxley understood that pleasure, when administered with regularity and precision, is a more efficient form of tyranny than any regime of fear. Today, soma has changed shape. It is not swallowed but slid with the finger. It is not synthesized in laboratories but generated by algorithms. Its formula depends not on alkaloids but on electrical impulses and vibrant colors. The principle, however, remains the same: small doses of euphoria that neutralize restlessness and replace thought with reaction.
Social networks, short videos, video games, and infinite feeds are the new pills of contentment — freely distributed, guiltlessly consumed, and renewed at every touch. What Huxley once called soma, we now call dopamine: a natural substance turned into a tool of collective domestication.
It is no longer necessary to imprison bodies when one can capture brains. It is enough to adjust the rhythm of stimuli, calibrate the reward, and maintain a gentle, constant sense of pleasure. Thus, the species that once conquered fire now warms itself by the cold light of screens — satisfied, docile, connected, and increasingly incapable of distinguishing pleasure from obedience.
This is the utopia that became reality: the chemical paradise of conformity. Control is not imposed — it is desired. Sweet, voluntary servitude replaces the exhausting freedom of thought.
Another concrete example — and perhaps the most emblematic — comes from contemporary pop music, which has moved away from the harmonic complexity and emotional unpredictability that characterized previous decades to become a neurochemical engineering of pleasure. What was once artistic expression and aesthetic experimentation has been transformed into a product carefully calibrated to stimulate, directly and continuously, the brain’s dopaminergic circuitry.
Research by Morten Kringelbach, Peter Vuust, and Kent Berridge (2016) demonstrated that musical pleasure depends on a delicate balance between predictability and surprise. When a melody confirms our expectations — but then subtly breaks them — the brain releases dopamine, activating the mesolimbic reward system. This process explains why certain chord progressions, rhythmic changes, or slight melodic variations can produce intense emotion, chills, and sensations of ecstasy. It is the pleasure of anticipation, not merely that of reward.
The study conducted by Laura Ferreri and Robert Zatorre (PNAS, 2019) went even further: by administering dopaminergic antagonists (substances that block dopamine’s action), the researchers observed that musical pleasure simply disappeared. The physiological and emotional reaction to music — smiles, chills, the urge to repeat — is literally fueled by dopamine. Music, therefore, is not merely art for the ears; it is neuroscience applied to emotion.
The music industry has understood and industrialized this mechanism. Today, hits are designed with mathematical precision: intros lasting only a few seconds, immediate choruses, consistent beats between 120 and 130 BPM (the rhythmic range that most activates the motor cortex and the nucleus accumbens), and melodic repetitions finely tuned to keep the listener in a state of mild, constant excitation. Every second is planned to maximize engagement, ensure replay, and generate mental loops.
The result is an aesthetic of predictable pleasure — songs that sound familiar even on first listen, structured to capture, comfort, and repeat. The listener, biologically conditioned, becomes a prisoner of their own chemistry. What was once catharsis has become automatic consumption; what once liberated now captures. Sound art, which once challenged reason, today speaks directly to the limbic system — not to move us, but to control us.
This logic is brilliantly exemplified in the video Africa (“’50s Style Toto Cover”) by Postmodern Jukebox, featuring Casey Abrams and Snuffy Walden — one of the most brilliant and symbolic music videos of the twenty-first century, a work that transcends entertainment and becomes a commentary on the very culture of instant pleasure.
Now, with the advance of artificial intelligence (AI), this process of social control through dopamine has reached an unprecedented — and deeply unsettling — level of refinement. Algorithms no longer merely predict what we want to hear, see, feel, think, or consume — they learn to feel and act for us. They map facial expressions, variations in heart rate, time spent on a song, and even micro-emotional reactions recorded by cameras, microphones, and sensors such as the accelerometers in your smartphone. Every click, pause, or swipe feeds systems that study our pleasure with the precision of a neuroscientist and the coldness of a machine. These AIs model human pleasure. They optimize every repetition to trigger the dopaminergic circuit with industrial efficiency. It is a mathematical pleasure — predictable, precise, and without memory.
Dopamine has become the new universal ideology — the invisible dogma that underpins faith, consumption, politics, the body, and even morality. It is the silent engine that drives markets, algorithms, and desire. To control dopamine is to control behavior; to manipulate pleasure is to dictate the destiny of the species. The contemporary world is no longer governed by laws or ideologies, but by calibrated stimuli designed to keep each individual in a state of mild euphoria and constant obedience. Media religions, political campaigns, digital cults, corporations, and platforms have all discovered the same key: there is no need to persuade when one can condition.
Skepticism — fragile and costly — requires silence and time, resources abolished by the regime of continuous stimulation. Doubt hurts; belief comforts. And comfort, in this chemical empire, is abundant and free — distributed like a digital sacrament.
We live under a faceless dictatorship, a power that does not need pain to dominate — reward is enough. Power now disguises itself as pleasure: vibrations, sounds, and instant rewards have replaced whips and decrees. Corporations, governments, churches, and artificial intelligences know our vulnerabilities better than we do — and within them lies the map of our surrender.
Dopamine acts before thought — a silent chemical coup that precedes reason. When we believe we are choosing what to see, read, or desire, the decision has already been made — not by consciousness, but by the brain’s hidden circuits and the algorithms of attention. We no longer think; we react. And every reaction, even the most spontaneous, has been programmed to occur.
None of this is accidental. The engineers of attention have inherited the wisdom of the casinos, where intermittent reinforcement turns rats — and men — into obedient lever-pullers, chemical slaves. Today, that lever shines in our hands, touchscreen. We scroll, we click, we watch — and every gesture is a microdose of pleasure that keeps us away from silence, the place where freedom once lived.
🧠 Examples of ecosystems that employ AI-powered recommendation engines and exploit dopaminergic retention mechanisms:
| Platform | Dopaminergic Retention Mechanism | Active Users (approx. 2025) | Dominant Type of Reinforcement |
|---|---|---|---|
| TikTok | Based on short, unpredictable video cycles, it uses intermittent reinforcement — the principle described by B. F. Skinner — to keep users in a continuous state of rewarding anticipation. Each swipe activates the dopaminergic system, generating a loop of curiosity and instant pleasure. | 1.6 billion | Sensory and emotional |
| Tinder | Based on random social rewards, it combines emotional validation and sexual desire. Each match acts as intermittent reinforcement, releasing dopamine with every pairing and creating behavioral dependence similar to gambling. | 75 million | Social and sexual |
| Sustained by the cycle of social validation, it links pleasure and self-image through likes, comments, and notifications. Each interaction is a micro social reward, reinforcing engagement and the pursuit of approval. | 2.4 billion | Social and narcissistic | |
| YouTube | With one of the most sophisticated AI recommendation systems today, its algorithm keeps users in a continuous flow of consumption, blending predictability and novelty to stimulate the dopaminergic circuit of controlled surprise. | 2.7 billion | Cognitive and sensory |
| Spotify | Uses machine learning to adjust playlists based on listening behavior, balancing predictability and musical novelty — classic triggers of musical pleasure. Dopamine is released in anticipation of the next track. | 600 million | Sensory and emotional |
| Netflix | Exploits dopaminergic anticipation through open endings and autoplay. The automatic continuation reinforces the habit of prolonged viewing, turning the viewer into a continuous consumer. | 270 million | Narrative and emotional |
| Functions as an ecosystem of social and cognitive reinforcements. The infinite feed blends emotional and ideological rewards, generating constant excitement and reducing critical reflection. | 3.0 billion | Social and ideological | |
| Betting platforms (Online Gambling) | Modeled after casino principles, they release dopamine during the anticipation of outcomes. Sounds, lights, and random rewards create dependence comparable to psychoactive drugs. | 420+ million | Financial and compulsive |
Dopamine is the invisible leash of the twenty-first century — a chain made of light, sound, fat, ideology, and habit. To free oneself from it is not to deny pleasure, but to reclaim control over it. Dopamine fasting thus becomes the most radical act of our time: voluntarily reducing the bombardment of stimuli, recovering chemical silence, and relearning the pleasure of slowness and thought. Turning off notifications, enduring boredom, reading without haste, walking without headphones — these are small acts of rebellion, microscopic insurgencies against the empire of programmed pleasure. To think slowly is today the most subversive of pleasures. The collapse of this regime will not come from noisy revolutions, but from the silent awakening of minds that decide, at last, to reclaim their own brains.
Because freedom, in this century, is not a political right — it is a chemical state. And it begins, inevitably, within the mind.
#dopamine #digitaladdiction #attentioneconomy #digitalcontrol #artificialintelligence #socialengineering #controlalgorithm #programmedpleasure #algorithmicsociety #neuroscience #algorithmicmanipulation #mindcontrol #technologicaldependence #rewardsystem #neurochemistryofmotivation #dopamineaddiction #digitalADHD #attentioncollapse #chronicdistraction #compulsiveconsumption #socialmedia #ai #technology #psychology #ADHD #aldoushuxley #bravenewworld #digitalsociety #slowingdown #viral #trending #fyp #explorepage
References
- Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex. London: Oxford University Press. — A classic work in which Ivan Petrovich Pavlov describes his experiments on classical conditioning, where dogs learned to associate neutral stimuli, such as the sound of a bell, with the arrival of food. The study revealed the physiological foundations of associative learning, demonstrating that behavior can be shaped through the anticipation of rewards — a principle that would become essential to behavioral psychology and modern theories of motivation and addiction.
- Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932. — A visionary novel on social control through pleasure, the conceptual foundation for the analogy with dopamine.
- Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of Reinforcement. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. — In this fundamental study, B. F. Skinner describes the principle of intermittent reinforcement, demonstrating that unpredictably distributed rewards maintain behavior longer than regular ones. The model became the theoretical basis for operant conditioning and is now applied to addiction, gaming, social media, and digital platform design that exploit dopaminergic engagement circuits.
- Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. 1985. — A seminal work analyzing how television — and, by extension, visual media — transformed public communication into entertainment. Postman anticipated the logic of the infotainment society, where information loses depth and critical thought is replaced by spectacle, foreshadowing with precision the cognitive and cultural impact of digital hyperstimulation.
- Schultz, W., Dayan, P., & Montague, P. R. (1997). A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward. Science, 275(5306), 1593–1599. — A seminal study demonstrating that midbrain dopaminergic neurons respond not only to received rewards but, above all, to the expectation of reward. This discovery introduced the concept of prediction error — the difference between what the brain expects and what actually occurs — and became the neurobiological foundation for understanding why anticipation of pleasure is more powerful than pleasure itself. The theory helped explain mechanisms of reinforcement learning, motivation, and behavioral addiction, including the design of social networks and variable reward systems.
- Montague, P. R., & Berns, G. S. (2002). Neural Economics and the Biological Substrates of Valuation. Neuron, 36(2), 265–284. — This article connects dopamine neuroscience with economic theories of decision-making, showing how the brain assigns value and learns from uncertain rewards. The work extended Schultz’s concept of prediction error into the field of neuroeconomics, revealing that the same mechanism that drives learning also sustains exploratory behavior and the constant search for variable rewards — the principle used in gaming, advertising, and digital platform design.
- Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. 2011. — An investigation of the mind’s automatic and rational systems, fundamental for understanding the capture of attention.
- Eyal, Nir. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. 2014. — A study of digital product design and the behavioral engineering of attention.
- Schultz, W. (2016). Dopamine Reward Prediction Error Coding. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 18(1), 23–32. — A contemporary review in which Wolfram Schultz details how the brain encodes reward prediction errors and adjusts dopamine release under uncertainty. The article summarizes decades of research, showing that dopamine does not measure pleasure itself, but rather the degree of surprise and expectation associated with it — a central mechanism in both adaptive learning and addictive disorders.
- Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (2016). Liking, Wanting, and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction. American Psychologist, 71(8), 670–679. — An influential work distinguishing between liking (pleasure) and wanting (desire), showing that dopamine is more closely associated with compulsive wanting than with pleasure. This theory, known as incentive-sensitization, explains why addiction depends not only on the pleasure of reward but on the hypersensitization of the dopaminergic system to desire — a phenomenon underlying both substance use and compulsive behaviors such as excessive social media use.
- Kringelbach, M. L., Vuust, P., & Berridge, K. C. (2016). A Unifying Account of the Pleasure of Music and Its Role in Social Bonding. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(7), 490–500. — Demonstrates how music activates the dopaminergic reward system by balancing predictability and surprise, explaining why familiar yet slightly varied sounds produce auditory pleasure and social connection.
- Lieberman, Daniel Z., & Long, Michael E. The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity — and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race. 2018. — A study of dopamine as the driving force of human behavior — the source of creativity and progress, but also of dissatisfaction and the relentless pursuit of “more” in the age of digital hyperstimulation.
- Ferreri, L., Mas-Herrero, E., Zatorre, R. J., Ripollés, P., Gomez-Andres, A., Alicart, H., Olivé, G., Marco-Pallarés, J., Antonijoan, R. M., Valle, M., Riba, J., & Rodríguez-Fornells, A. (2019). Dopamine Modulates the Reward Experiences Elicited by Music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 116(9), 3793–3798. — Provides experimental evidence that dopamine regulates the intensity of musical pleasure, showing that pharmacological manipulation of dopaminergic levels alters the emotional response to music.
- Lembke, Anna. Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. 2021. — A clinical analysis of contemporary dopamine dependence and its neuropsychological impacts.
- World Health Organization (2022). Obesity and Overweight — Fact Sheet. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight — In 2022, around 16% of adults were living with obesity.
- DemandSage. Average Screen Time Statistics – 2025 (2025). Available at: https://www.demandsage.com/screen-time-statistics/ — Data show that, globally, the average daily screen time reached approximately 6 hours and 45 minutes.
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