Ask A Genius 212 – Arousal Addictions
Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner
June 28, 2017
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There is a psychology of failure to adapt to these rapid changes with older men followed by younger men. It is the psychologizing it, or providing new diagnoses of it, with things like “Arousal Addictions.” Have you heard of this?
Rick Rosner: No, but go ahead.
Jacobsen: It is not more of the same, as with cocaine, for example, but it more of different things, and so arousal addictions. It would be something like “Pornography: Variations on a Theme, of Addiction.”
What happens is you get a shot of dopamine in the reward system in the brain, in particular the nucleus accumbens, it feels good.
Typically, what happens as you grow up is the prefrontal cortex, which is the house of executive function, allows you to plan, be conscientious, be moral, delay gratification, and so on, from which then once you accomplish these plans and delay this gratification, and succeed for the thing that was a later gratification, and so on, you get that shot of dopamine from the nucleus accumbens.
So, you have a system: planning ahead, delay of gratification from the prefrontal cortex for executive function, get a reward, nucleus accumbens activates and you feel good, so you get real world context. You get the context. But with pornography and video games, you get reward and no context.
Rosner: All of this stuff spreads across all thee other parts of life. So, trolls feel as though they won’t get laid, but also a lot of them also feel like there’s no path to good employment. They feel as if there is no achievement path for sex, for work, and so that increases the alienation and the hostility.
Also, there are more paths to pretty high levels of easy gratification than there were 40 years ago. Entertainment is more entertaining, food tastes better now, I have said this before. In the 70s, things sucked and sex was definitely one of the best things to aspire to.
There were so many other awesome things. Now, there is a lot more entertaining stuff in the world. So, sex doesn’t have to be the main thing you aspire to – so that is even more reason for trolls not to aspire.
Video game culture is about achieving gratification via entertainment rather than building a path to the future. I don’t know whether gamers, if you survey them, view what they do as temporary and then they’ll grudgingly attempt to fit into the traditional adult world.
The way, you know—I mean, if you survey guidos, and I assume there are, they will say it is a temporary thing they are doing while they can and will settle down and get married. The people on Jersey Shore settle down and have kids.
Snooki has written 3 books so far, maybe more, including one on parenting. Fucking Snooki! Who passes out by dumpsters while pissing, has written a bunch of books. J-Wow, also a dumpster pisser.
Jacobsen: I do not have experience with dumpster pissing.
Rosner: For work, I had to watch a lot of Jersey Shore. There was a lot pissing by a dumpster because you were drunk and couldn’t be bothered to go inside. You’re drunk already. I don’t know whether trolls, or what percent of them, consider this a temporary phase and then they’ll take on some kind of adult role.
Eventually, that they’ll try to grow up.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
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Rick Rosner 