How Digital Media Use Hijacks the Brain’s Learning System

Nothing that is existentially valuable in life comes without effort.

This is something I genuinely believe and often find myself saying to my patients as I try to, on one hand, help them rediscover meaning in struggle, discomfort and sometimes even in suffering and, to the other hand, as I try instead to uncover the illusion of easy happiness that often lies behind behaviours and habits requiring little effort or frustration, but ultimately offering little meaning in return.

Nothing that is existentially valuable in life comes without effort. Most people immediately recognise this as a wise, and self-evident truth. And yet, this is also a deeply provocative statement.

Because we are living in a civilization increasingly organised around a radically different premise, modern environments provide unprecedented access to an endless stream of stimuli capable of generating immediate gratification.

This might not be absolutely negative in itself, but, as we know, biological systems tend to follow the path of least resistance and, when that path is constantly available, it risks becoming the only path we pursue.

So a reasonable hypothesis, and concern is that when some rewards are easily accessible, we may stop pursuing the goals that require effort – goals that often entail far greater resistant meaning.

You might be familiar with an influential book entitled ”The Anxious Generation”. My thesis here is that we should also be concerned about another phenomenon, what I will provocatively call the promotion of “an addicted Generation”.

This is the question I want to explore in this episode: What happens to a person, to a generation, when a civilization is built around easy access to rewards rather than cultivating meaning? What happens when the brain’s most essential learning system operates in such an environment?

My name is Elisabetta Burchi. I’m a physician, clinical Psychiatrist and host of the Renaissance Doctor. This podcast exists to explore an ambitious question: what does it mean to be human and to flourish in the 21st century?

Today we are going to talk about learning and addiction, learning as a key feature of brain functioning and addiction as a form of disrupted learning. We will leverage neuroscience to describe the concepts and we will embrace sociological and ethical perspectives to discuss the tools we have to not let the environment entirely shape our lives.

I’ve always been fascinated by patterns- by the search for underlying principles and invariant logics capable of explaining seemingly different phenomena; not only as an intellectual exercise, but perhaps as a way of making sense of complexity and orienting myself in the world.

When I began my training in Psychiatry, I found myself driven by the same attitude. What distinguishes mental health from mental disorder ? And what ultimately justifies my intervention as a Psychiatrist? Over the years my answer has evolved.

Yet, from the very beginning, one aspect stood out. I soon recognised that what often characterises mental suffering is a reduction in a person’s sense of agency. Rigid beliefs, intrusive thoughts, overwhelming emotions, compulsive behaviours: in different ways they all constrain our ability to choose.

And because I’ve always believed that the capacity for self-determination is one of the defining features of human beings, I came to see Psychiatry, at least in part, as an attempt to restore that capacity: to restore flexibility and help individuals recover the ability to learn, adapt, and consciously shape their lives.

In this view, treatment is not merely about making people feel better. It is about helping them regain agency. It was through this lens that I became particularly interested in addiction. Partly because addictive behaviours seemed to be becoming increasingly common in society, but also because addiction appeared to represent, in its purest form, the very phenomenon that had first drawn me to Psychiatry.

If agency is central to mental health, addiction may be one of the clearest examples of what happens when agency is progressively lost. 
In addiction, behaviour is initially voluntary.

Then it becomes habitual; eventually it becomes compulsive. The person continues to act, but increasingly loses the ability to choose otherwise.

Next to the question of agency, I had always been fascinated by what I came to see as the other side of the same coin: drive, motivation. 
What drives us to act? What underpins curiosity, ambition, exploration and desire?

After all, every addiction begins with a choice. It begins with a person seeking something -, pleasure, relief, connection, excitement, belonging, meaning. What begins as an attempt to satisfy a desire can eventually frustrate the very need that gave rise to it in the first place.

Neuroscience points to a set of neural systems involved in motivation and learning often associated with dopamine. These are the same systems that become progressively disrupted in addiction. 
During my fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, I became increasingly interested in this connection.

This eventually led me to develop a model of addiction not simply as a disorder of reward, but as a disorder of learning. And I believe that understanding addiction through this lens can teach us something important, not only about mental disorders, but also about how to navigate the challenges of modern life.

Let me explain. I always love to start from definitions because shared definitions are the foundations of shared understanding. And if we are going to think differently about addiction, we first need to understand something even more fundamental: Learning.

The concepts of “learning” and “addiction” are broadly used in layman language as many other terms used in Psychiatry and, yet, have multiple neural and behavioural definitions reflecting the long-standing ambiguity regarding brain-behaviour relationships.

Let’s then find some common ground. 
What is learning? Learning, as a concept, has been central to psychology since its scientific inception, being at the core of behaviourism first and of cognitivism later.

Learning can be defined at a behavioural level as the optimization of behavioural performance over time. It can also be defined, from a cognitive perspective, as a cognitive process intended broadly as acquiring or building knowledge in the interaction with a given environment or domain.

At an even more fundamental level, learning can be understood as an optimization process that occurs in all evolving systems. This process involves an initial period of trial-and-error exploration of choices, and the acceptance or rejection of results based on some criteria.

In other words, learning is the process through which an organism adapts its behaviour based on experience. In this broader sense, even biological evolution can be viewed as a form of learning.

Every living organism faces the same challenge: how to navigate an uncertain world and increase its chances of survival and flourishing. To do so, it must continuously answer questions such as: what should I approach, what should I avoid?

What is valuable, what is dangerous? Learning is the process through which those answers are gradually refined. In this sense, learning is not merely a human activity. It is one of the basic principles through which complex systems evolve.

And, at the biological level, learning is the process whereby organisms explore their surroundings and develop behavioural patterns having the greatest probability of satisfying biological needs such as nutrition, hydration, shelter, and mating, while minimising the risk of pain,injury or death.

At a neural level, the mechanism is strikingly elegant.

The neural instantiation of learning involves multiple cortical and subcortical circuits –  primarily the cortex and the basal ganglia- and it depends on dopamine signalling. You might have heard of dopamine in relation to pleasure.

Actually, in reality, this is one of the most widespread misconceptions in neuroscience. Dopamine is not primarily the molecule of pleasure, it is the molecule of learning. More specifically, dopamine acts as what neuroscientists call a “reward prediction error” signal.

To understand what this means, we first need to introduce another important concept: reward. 

A reward is any outcome that increases the desirability of the state or action that produced it. Any outcome that increases the probability that a behaviour will be repeated in the future. That desirability, in human beings, is, in part, biologically ingrained.

Think about food when we are hungry. Water, when we are thirsty. Safety when we are threatened. And, in part, it is social: approval, recognition, status, achievement, belonging.

What neuroscientists showed is that dopaminergic neurons do not primarily fire in response to reward itself. They respond to the difference between what  expected and what actually happened.

The so-called “reward prediction error”. 

Dopamine neurons fire when something is better than predicted, they are silent or they actively decrease their firing when something is worse than expected. This asymmetry is what drives learning. This discrepancy, the gap between the expectation and outcome, becomes a teaching signal.

In a profound sense, dopamine helps the brain update its model of the world, and, consequently, the behaviours that can drive us towards maximisation of reward. Learning, therefore, is not simply the accumulation of information.

It is the continuous process through which we refine our understanding of reality and adapt our actions accordingly. 

And because human beings spent much of their lives pursuing rewards that are social, symbolic and cultural rather than purely biological, the importance of learning extends far beyond survival. And as we will see soon, it also lies at the heart of addiction.

Now then, what is addiction? 

The word itself comes from the Latin word “addictio”. In Roman law it was the judicial act by which a debtor, a person born free, who could not repay his debts, was handed over in slavery to his creditor.

An “addictus” was a free person who had become enslaved. The word has always carried this paradox; something began as a choice, and then became a captivity. 

The modern medical conception of addiction began in the early 19th century in relation to substances. And after having been excluded from manuals for many years, addiction has not only been officially reintroduced in DSM 5 but its territory expanded with the “Substance Related and addictive disorders” chapter

including which includes gambling disorder next to nine types of substance addictions. Addiction now designates a process and a chronically relapsing condition whereby a behaviour, that can function either to produce pleasure or provide relief from internal discomfort, is employed in a pattern characterised by recurrent failure to control the behaviour, and continuation of the behaviour despite significant negative consequences.

While this phenomenological concept of addiction can be descriptive and inclusive of non-substance related conditions, the term has been traditionally applied in relation to the use of specific drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, that have been later found to not only exert similar behavioural, but also neurobiological effects on the user.

According to the DSM5, substance use disorders are all characterised by four domains: pharmacological dependence, impaired control over use, risky decision making related to use, and social and functional impairment.

The key behavioural feature which I find deeply striking is the perpetuation of consumption despite the awareness that the adverse effects progressively outweigh the increasingly elusive hedonic effects. 
The addicted person continues to consume despite the awareness that the adverse effects have come to outweigh the pleasurable ones.
They know.

And they continue. Why? A compelling theory is that this paradoxical behaviour is the direct result of an alteration in the very learning processes I just described. In other words, if learning is the process by which organisms optimise behaviour based on reward, then addiction is its degeneration, being characterised by continuation of behaviours despite significant negative consequences.

While effective learning serves to increase the fitness of the individual in a determined environment, the effects promoted by addictive substances represent critical vulnerabilities of the same system for which no natural defences or compensatory homeostatic mechanisms have yet evolved.

But how does that happen? 

There are multiple lines of research that show how addictive substances and behaviours actually hijack the learning system. Let me start from the perspective of affective neuroscience, a perspective which corroborates my idea that learning is the key feature of cognitive functioning and that addiction can model other mental disorders.

Affective neuroscience is the interdisciplinary study of how the brain generates, regulates and represents affective states, including emotions, feelings, motivational drives and hedonic experiences, and how these states influence cognition and behaviour.

In this field, I want to introduce the work of a remarkable scientist:  , who spent his career mapping what he called the primary emotional systems of the mammalian brain. Panksepp identified seven fundamental emotional systems that are conserved across all mammals, from rodents to humans.

They are wired into ancient subcortical circuits operating below the level of conscious thought. And the most fundamental of all – , the one that participates in virtually every other system –  is what Panksep called the “seeking system”.

The seeking system is exactly what it sounds like: the neural drive toward exploration, toward anticipation, towards the pursuit of things that matter. It is, in Panksepp’s formulation, the very substrate of motivation.the engine of desire, which is underpinned by dopamine

Without exploration, there is no discovery. Without discovery, there is no learning. And without learning, there is no adaptation…

And here again follows another clear formulation of the role of dopamine in relation to the difference between motivation and pleasure, a distinction that Berridge at the University of Michigan has made beautifully precise. There is a difference between “wanting” and “liking”.

The dopamine system drives wanting, the motivated pursuit of reward. The experience of liking of actual pleasure is mediated instead by different circuits, opioid related systems in the brain. 

Within this framework, addictive substances and behaviours primarily hijack  the wanting system, not the liking system. They artificially inflate the signal that says this is what you should pursue without necessarily increasing the actual pleasure derived from it.

This is what the work or reward prediction error tells us about addiction. Addictive substances have the capacity to directly induce phasic dopamine release, bypassing the legitimate feedback loop of learning, by bypassing the judgement of the outcome of the actions implemented.

The brain’s internal learning compass, the system that says “this is worth pursuing, this is how to spend your time and energy”, gets recalibrated around the substance, or the behaviour, not because the substance brings value, but because the signal that registers value has been artificially amplified.

If we want to formalise it – and here I draw on work I developed with Prof. Eskandar at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York – 

the learning agent, the brain is making decisions based on a corrupted feedback signal. Phasic dopamine release is that internal tightly regulated control signal, and addictive substances can hijack  this signal and directly potentiate active cortical striatal synapses, potentiating stimulus-response patterns associated with their consumption.

This effect is potentially compounded by an early and abnormal transition of the same stimulus-response pairings toward the habitual system. Together, the two effects have the potential to cause a profound distortion in the learning circuitry leading to the rapid development of highly potent associations and behavioural patterns.

These are extremely difficult to abandon, even in the face of perceived harm. In other words, while effective learning serves to increase the fitness of the individual in a determined environment, the effects promoted by addictive substances represent critical vulnerabilities of the same system for which no natural defence or compensatory homeostatic mechanisms  have yet evolved.

So addiction can be understood as a corruption of the brain’s learning signal. The brain continuously updates its understanding of what is valuable and worth pursuing. Addictive, substances artificially amplify that signal; as a result the brain learns disproportionately strong associations between the substance and the reward, while progressively discounting alternative sources of value.

What emerges is not simply a strong preference. It’s a profound distortion of learning itself. One that gradually narrows behaviour and reduces flexibility even in the face of harm. We posit that this phenomenon, the increase in phasic dopamine release induced by addictive substances, the consequent exaggeration in the internal reward value attributed to stimuli associated with the same substances and the profound decisional and behavioural bias towards drug-seeking and consumption while also engendering discount of risk and tolerance of hazardous behaviours in pursuit of this substance are all critical elements in the development of substance use disorders.

Now that we have described how certain substances can hijack the learning system from a neural standpoint, it is useful to describe the corresponding clinical events. Clinically, addiction often follows a recognisable trajectory.

What begins as voluntary engagement, gradually becomes habitual and eventually compulsive. George Koob described this progression as a cycle, moving from reward and intoxication to withdrawal and negative effect, and finally to craving and preoccupation.

While the details are complex, the broader lesson is simple: The brain adapts, and when learning systems are repeatedly exposed to artificially amplified rewards, they reorganise around them. The result is not merely excessive consumption.

It is a progressive narrowing of behavioural flexibility, a reduction in agency. And that is why addiction is not simply a problem of pleasure: it’s a problem of learning.

Now that we have broadly discussed the science behind learning and addiction, I want to make a leap and share that the findings extensively reported in the context of substance addiction are also found in relationship to engagement with certain behaviours.

Importantly, it looks like the same neural processes are being engaged by technologies that billions of people, including children, use every day. This is where I find the work of Daniela Lucangeli, professor of Developmental Psychology in Padua, particularly enlightening.

She has been tracking what happens to children’s learning system when they are immersed in digital technologies from their earliest years. And the picture is concerning. 

Consider this. On average, people unlock their phones 80 times a day. We tap, type and swipe our smartphones an average of 2,600 times daily, a number greater than the moments of genuine conscious presence most of us have in a day.

And every notification, every unexpected piece of content delivers a small dopamine pulse. 

And over time, and this is the crucial part, the dopamine is released earlier and earlier in the anticipatory sequence. The reaching-for-the-phone becomes rewarding in itself before anything is even received.

The seeking system is being trained not to work towards curiosity, not towards the kind of exploration that leads to competence and meaning, but towards an endless shallow loop of anticipation and microrewards.

Several studies have associated intensive digital media use with changes in attention, executive functioning and structural differences in brain regions involved in cognitive control. 

And something more subtle, but perhaps more relevant, a recalibration of what feels like enough and worth pursuing. Natural rewards begin to feel insufficient compared to the amplified immediate feedback of the screen.

Rewards that require more efforts, such as ambitious projects, but also human relationships, are easily given up or not even explored. The capacity to delay gratification and endure frustration concerningly falls.

A question that arises: are we rebuilding environments -and handling our children tools- that train the seeking system towards depth, and growth, or towards an increasingly shallow loop of effortless stimulation?

The generation growing up now, and I say this not with alarm but with a sense of responsibility, is the first generation whose reward systems have been shaped from infancy by algorithms. We are not yet clear what this means for their capacity for learning, for meaning, for the kind of sustained effort existentially valuable things require.

We do not fully know the consequences and, but early data is not reassuring. Now I want to be clear. 

As Pope Leo beautifully said in Magnifica Humanitas, technology is not intrinsically bad. It’s good because it was produced by the human genius. The point is to make the human factor matters also in how we decide to use technology.

And this requires proactive, thoughtful understanding of it.

Paradoxically, what this quickly evolving environment pushes us not to do. We would instead need to stop and try to make philosophical understanding of what the human mind has created and govern it in a desired direction.

One of the most damaging legacies of our understanding of addiction has been the moral frame. Before neuroscience gave us a mechanistic account, addiction was widely understood as a moral failure, as a sign of bad character, of insufficient willpower.

This framing was not only scientifically wrong, it was actively harmful because it prevented people from seeking help; it caused shame that compounded suffering. 

It located the problem in the person rather than in the interaction between a vulnerable human nervous system and a specific environment.

Addiction is not fundamentally a story about substances. It is a story about human vulnerability. The learning-based model of addiction showed us how addiction is the consequence of the interaction with specific stimuli that have the potential to disrupt the learning processes and make the system and the human being even more vulnerable in terms of capacity to self-determine its own behaviours.

The same systems that allow us to learn and to flourish are the systems that can be exploited and distorted.

We have seen that if addiction is a learning disorder, if it represents the hijacking of the same systems that drives all human learning, all human growth, then we can begin to see it as a prototype for a much wider class of mental disorders which all involve the rigidity and pervasiveness of certain learned responses, certain patterns that the system has encoded and struggles to escape from.

This is why addiction deserves neither stigma nor romanticization. It deserves understanding. Understanding addiction ultimately means understanding something essential about ourselves, that we are creatures shaped by experience, continuously learning from the environments we inhabit.

The issue then also becomes an ethical and societal one. Are we building the environments that support the kind of learning that leads to flourishing or the kind that leads to captivity? 

There are hints for all of us here, but I would like to end by sharing a few potential suggestions. Some of them come from the work of Anna Lembke, which wrote Dopamine Nation and which has written a lot about her clinical work with patients with addiction.

One of her core insights is that we are living in an age of radical oversupply. Indeed, the modern world offers immediate, infinite pleasures. And the brain’s response to this is to lower the baseline, to require more stimulation to achieve the same response, to make ordinary life feel flat and insufficient.

Her prescription is countercultural: periods of voluntary abstinence, not as a punishment, but as a recalibration; the deliberate acceptance of small, manageable doses of discomfort – 

physical exercise, delay, struggle – as a way of restoring the sensitivity of the reward system; the pursuit of pleasure in what is natural, relational, creative rather than what is immediate and effortless.

And here, I would add, there is some ethic that needs to come back: our decision about what is more important, more valuable. We need to proactively engage in what is more meaningful for us from a value standpoint in our life, irrespectively of what is more available or easy to be accessed.

And this brings me back to where I began, to what I believe, from an ethical standpoint: nothing that is existentially valuable in life comes without effort. This is not because suffering is inherently noble, nor because pleasure is somehow wrong.

The thing is that meaningful learning always involves uncertainty. It requires the willingness to tolerate frustration, to accept t not-yet-knowing, and to persist despite not-yet-achieving.

The environment we inhabit increasingly offers us rewards that require very little of us. But human flourishing asks for something more. I agree with Viktor Frankl, who observed that human beings are ultimately organised around the search for meaning which is discovered in the conscious relationship between effort and purpose.

And once meaning is seen and understood, pleasure can follow it. And meaning rarely emerges from passive consumption. It emerges through engagement, through responsibility, through commitment to something beyond immediate gratification.

The opposite of addiction is not abstinence. The opposite of addiction is agency. To choose rather than merely react. To pursue what matters rather than what is immediately pleasurable.

Because the same systems that make addiction possible are also the systems that make human flourishing possible. The question is not whether we will be shaped by our environment. The question is whether we will consciously participate in that shaping and whether we will build lives and societies that cultivate meaning rather than pleasure disconnected from meaning.

Because the goal of life is not simply to feel good. The goal, I think, is to flourish.

In the next episode, we will continue this inquiry, but from a different angle. We will ask: if reward, detached from effort, can distort learning, what happens when comfort becomes an end in itself, detached from growth?

What is the price of comfort, and what is, instead, the value of pain? I will see you there.