Is social media this generation's heroin?

A fascinating article in the New York Times this week by Kurt Gray, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,

gives us the beginnings of an understanding of how and why social media is so destructive to society.

Gray points out that most people assume humans have historically been predators,

the metaphorical big cats of the jungle. In fact, Gray says we've historically been prey,

the victims of predators. Quote, this picture of fearfulness is consistent with our understanding of

human psychology. We're hardwired to detect threats quickly and to stay

fixated on places where threats once appeared, even after they've vanished. We fear that child

predators will abduct our kids, even when they're safer than ever. Modern humans, ensconced in towns

and cities, are now mostly safe from animal predators, but we are still easily frightened.

Whether we're scrolling social media or voting for a presidential candidate,

we still carry the legacy of our ancestors who worried about big cats lurking in the darkness.

Thus, if you could invent a drug that would cause people to be fearful and thus stimulate the rage that comes from fear, you could have incredible

control over our population if you could simply tell them where and against whom to direct

that fear-induced rage. We all have opiate receptors in our brains that modulate our response

to pain. Compounds that bind to these receptors are produced naturally

by our body in response to extreme pain and shock, and numerous plants, most famously opium poppies,

naturally produce chemicals that bind to and activate our opium receptors.

When we lived in Germany back in the late 1980s, I loved to visit a nearby castle in

Kuhnbacher and order Munkuchen, a pie crust filled with poppy seeds ground into a paste with sugar

and a few spices. I always felt so good after eating a slice or two of the pie. When we had a glass

of fresh German reeling with it,

...