Dopamine in the Metaverse

Dennis just moved across the country to San Francisco, the first time in our lives we’ll live more than ten miles apart. We became friends in college, but crossed paths before that at high school wrestling tournaments. Dennis assures me we actually met even earlier, at a summer camp we attended together before fifth grade. To both of our embarrassments, I remembered every detail about the camp except that he was there.

I won’t forget the details of the memories we have created since: how we gathered weekly to watch football or play board games, how we backpacked through Europe, how he tried in vain to teach me to salsa dance in Cuba, and, how he – thankfully with more success – pushed me to pluck up the courage to ask out my now fiancée. And so, the gray and blue speech bubbles in iMessage lured me into the fantasy he painted of a world where living across the county was meaningless: the Metaverse.

Dennis’s habit of reading every article he comes across has greatly expanded my understanding of the world. Most recently, he told me about the billions of dollars tech companies are pouring into virtual reality, anticipating a boom akin to the dawn of the internet. They say there will be a snowball effect, where each new person who adopts the technology makes it better and better until everyone is in VR, and no one wants to leave. All it takes is for the first dominos to fall as VR becomes more fun than reality or more efficient in the workplace. Then it will replace every aspect of our lives.

I remained skeptical.

Addicting. Now we were entering my world. As a graduate student at Mount Sinai, I study the neurobiology of addiction. All addictive drugs cause an increase in dopamine in the brain’s reward center, but in addition to encoding reward, dopamine also facilitates learning and motor behavior. When something is pleasurable, we learn to reproduce the behaviors that led to the reward, a principle called positive reinforcement. When I think of dopamine I think of learning.

A seminal experiment showed that the dopamine bursts associated with reward only occur if the reward is unexpected: present the same reward, like sugar, in the same context over and over, and there is no longer a spike of dopamine. If there are cues presented that predict the reward, like a bell, over time the dopamine bursts when the cue is presented, but not when the animal receives the reward. Hearing the bell may be a surprise, but once that happens, the reward is expected. In fact, after learning an association, if an animal doesn’t receive the reward after hearing the cue, its brain shows a drop in dopamine below baseline, an anti-reward. This system is helpful for learning to interact with our environment, but in the case of addiction, chemical manipulations of this circuit by addictive drugs like alcohol, cocaine, or heroin prevent the brain from adapting and trap it in a cycle of continued use.

Still, the human mind is the greatest learning machine on earth, only surpassed by 1) a gathering of human minds, and 2) a gathering of human minds armed with computers. It turns out understanding the mind is highly profitable for gatherings of minds and computers called companies, such that the world of neuroscience is no longer separate from the world of Silicon Valley. Tech companies have used knowledge of the dopamine system to craft algorithms that maximize engagement with their products. Understanding that a constant stream of expected rewards actually reduces the dopamine response over time, they instead use algorithms that hit users with the content they crave on an intermittent reinforcement schedule, meaning at sparse, random times like a slot machine. Casinos knew this trick before neuroscientists. This way the reward stays unexpected, the dopamine fires, and the behavior, like scrolling through the phone, becomes reinforced until it’s a habit. At the same time, the algorithms track user behavior to learn which content is most interesting, engaging, and rewarding.

Part of the hype around the Metaverse comes from the meteoric rise of smartphones and social media, to the point where they’ve become appendages of the body and mind. When the first iPhone came out, just the act of scrolling was magical, turning the screen into a window where one could touch the internet. In virtual reality tech companies see opportunity, but skeptics see a threat. They are afraid people will get trapped inside the Metaverse, not because the new world is better, but because they are addicted, imprisoned by animal minds as programmable as the devices made of silicon. 

Notwithstanding the possibility of addiction, there is good reason to be suspicious of technologies designed to elicit a dopamine response. One thing I’ve learned in the lab is that if the purpose of life were to maximize dopamine levels in the brain, we would all do a lot more cocaine. Another thing I’ve learned in the lab is that it is not a good idea to use cocaine. If our dopamine neurons were perfect judges of what’s good in the world, maybe it would make sense to cater our lives to them, but biologically dopamine is more useful as a learning facilitator than as an end in itself. Animals learn to navigate their environment and find food, shelter, information, and social connections including potential mates to win the game of natural selection, and dopamine bursts represent the fitness advantage of the rewards they collect, but this representation can be distorted by chemicals or technology.

Dopamine is released while scrolling through social media because it feels like the user is learning how to get what they want out of the app, but, in reality, the algorithm is doing all the work and the user only contributes the wanting. Having the machine learn while the user doesn’t has real downsides, namely that people are imperfect and their imperfections get amplified in addition to their desires. These imperfections include distorted self-images, leading to mental health problems like anxiety, depression, or eating disorders, or political misconceptions that amplify into conspiracy theories and extremism. We need to be connected to reality to create a mental model of our world and learn how to operate within it.

And yet, there is a positive side to tech. Since moving to San Francisco, Dennis has used social media to connect with new friends and communities he never would have met IRL. Tech helps people gather over shared ideas in art, science, medicine, and business, allowing them to harness the learning power of multiple human minds to create things none of them could have on their own. It has granted people from all walks of life access to the wealth of human information, as well as a voice and platform that only a select few used to possess. Learning is power. To me, the most important question when evaluating technology is “Who does this help learn?” 

Learning allows us to see the consequences of our actions and become better. Dennis moved to San Francisco because he was disillusioned with how his old company pursued money at all costs, so he got a job that balanced profit motive with a desire to improve the environment and fight climate change. Dennis is one of the best learners I know, and I have learned a lot from our friendship.

I still have reservations about whether the Metaverse can form these kinds of bonds. Would Dennis and I have become friends if we didn’t connect over growing up in the same physical location? Would we have developed the same trust as we saw the world together if we hadn’t needed to coordinate travel logistics? On the other hand, technologies like cellphones and video chats allowed us to stay connected through the pandemic. If the Metaverse helps us gather from anywhere in the world and learn from each other in new ways, it might be a transformative technology after all.

But I’m not a tech or market expert, so I won’t prognosticate on its success. I did get to try VR recently, and it impressed me with how realistic it was. Actually, the ping pong game was so realistic my fiancée took a dive into the television while going after a ball. So, there are still bugs to work out. But if we remain vigilant and use VR to gather and learn from each other, it could allow us to create a better world in reality.

Photo Credits: https://ifaketextmessage.com

Disclaimer: Dennis’s name has been changed, and quotes paraphrased

From the artist: This piece came out of a conversation with my friend about how virtual reality will change our ability to gather.