The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains - Softcover

Lustig, Robert H.

 
9781101982945: The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1101982942 ISBN 13: 9781101982945
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

"Explores how industry has manipulated our most deep-seated survival instincts."—David Perlmutter, MD, Author, #1 New York Times bestseller, Grain Brain and Brain Maker

The New York Times–bestselling author of Fat Chance reveals the corporate scheme to sell pleasure, driving the international epidemic of addiction, depression, and chronic disease.
 
While researching the toxic and addictive properties of sugar for his New York Times bestseller Fat Chance, Robert Lustig made an alarming discovery—our pursuit of happiness is being subverted by a culture of addiction and depression from which we may never recover.
           
Dopamine is the “reward” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we want more; yet every substance or behavior that releases dopamine in the extreme leads to addiction. Serotonin is the “contentment” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we don’t need any more; yet its deficiency leads to depression. Ideally, both are in optimal supply. Yet dopamine evolved to overwhelm serotonin—because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they were constantly motivated—with the result that constant desire can chemically destroy our ability to feel happiness, while sending us down the slippery slope to addiction. In the last forty years, government legislation and subsidies have promoted ever-available temptation (sugar, drugs, social media, porn) combined with constant stress (work, home, money, Internet), with the end result of an unprecedented epidemic of addiction, anxiety, depression, and chronic disease. And with the advent of neuromarketing, corporate America has successfully imprisoned us in an endless loop of desire and consumption from which there is no obvious escape.
           
With his customary wit and incisiveness, Lustig not only reveals the science that drives these states of mind, he points his finger directly at the corporations that helped create this mess, and the government actors who facilitated it, and he offers solutions we can all use in the pursuit of happiness, even in the face of overwhelming opposition. Always fearless and provocative, Lustig marshals a call to action, with seminal implications for our health, our well-being, and our culture.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert H. Lustig, M.D., MSL, is professor of pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology and a member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at University of California, San Francisco. He has authored 120 peer-reviewed articles and 70 reviews, as well as Fat Chance, The Fat Chance Cookbook, and Metabolical. He has mentored 30 pediatric endocrine fellows and trained numerous other allied health professionals. He is the former chairman of the Obesity Task Force of the Pediatric Endocrine Society, a member of the Obesity Task Force of the Endocrine Society, and a member of the Pediatric Obesity Devices Committee of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He is also the president of the nonprofit Institute for Responsible Nutrition, dedicated to reversing childhood obesity and Type 2 Diabetes. He consults for several childhood obesity advocacy groups and government agencies.

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Once upon a time we were happy. Then the snake showed up. And we've been miserable ever since. Hieronymus Bosch's painting Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1500) is a triptych housed in the Prado in Madrid. It is an allegorical warning of what happens when we squander our birthright of happiness divined from God in one garden and move on to the pleasures of the flesh in the next garden, with the inevitable result of eternal damnation. Figures. Our most lauded goal in life-to be happy-is seemingly an illusion, out of reach for us common folk. Except the rich aren't any happier. Happiness seems to be a mirage, something to chase after, to keep us turning over rocks, kissing frogs, and trying to fit keys into the magic lock.

But along the way, wandering through our own individual gardens of earthly delights in search of our seemingly unobtainable nirvanas, we've sure had a whole lot of fun. Or we've at least tried to. We buy shiny things, play Powerball, imbibe with friends or sometimes alone. So why are so many of us miserable? Are we destined just to sink further into the abyss of pleasure with no hope of extricating ourselves to find real happiness? Is it all futile? Lots of people have died trying to get to that magic place of contentment and inner peace, that thing called "happiness." But if we can't get there, what's the point?

What if I told you that happiness is right there in front of you, just behind the curtain of your own brain?

To some, an argument over the difference between pleasure and happiness might seem like a straw man, a false argument not really worth having. Hey, they both feel good; why should you care? And pleasure is here, now. Happiness . . . maybe not so much, and not so soon.

But it does matter. And not just to you but to all of society. Explaining the differences between these two otherwise positive emotions form the narrative arc of this book.

Terms of Endearment

Pleasure takes many forms and has many synonyms: "gratification," "amusement," "indulgence," "titillation," "turn-on." But the experience of pleasure is the visceral readout of activity of a specific brain area known as the "reward pathway." In fact, pleasure is actually two phenomena in one. First, one experiences the motivation for a given reward. Second, one experiences the consummation of that reward as the visceral experience we call pleasure. For simplicity, I will call it reward so both the social science and the neuroscience can effectively be treated as one.

The old adage goes, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Same for happiness. Happiness is in the brain of the experiencer. And it too has its own brain area, known as the "contentment pathway." But as a philosophical concept, happiness has a long history and has been tangled up with the history of society for as long as there's been society. Happiness consists of a grab bag of definitions that have changed and morphed over time. The root of the word, "hap," means luck. And we see this etymological root in other words relating to chance occurrence: for instance, happenstance or perhaps. Early societies weren't very happy; after all, with famine, plague, and war, they had a lot to be unhappy about. Happiness was chance, fleeting, and seemed to alight on only a select few in any given society.

The God Factor

Religion has been the arbiter of both pleasure and happiness since there was religion. By no means is the brief history that follows meant to be exhaustive, but understanding where we came from can help us determine where we are going.

The Jewish tradition says that the study of the Torah is the path to happiness, because "all its paths are peace," and by following the law one could not help but achieve happiness. The Greeks are on record for jump-starting both the pleasure and happiness industries. In the third century BCE they wrestled the concept of happiness away from the concept of hedonism, the philosophy that said that the goal of life was net pleasure (pleasure minus pain). Aristotle expanded on the Jewish concept and argued that happiness consisted of being a good ethical person, a manifestation of reason and virtue, and coined the term eudemonia, a synonym for "contentment" (the concept on which this book is based). Zeno, the father of Stoicism, took this up a notch to say that unhappiness resulted from errors of judgment and that the true sage was immune to unhappiness; the converse of this was, of course, that if you were unhappy, you were no sage. Epicurus weighed in to say that happiness was a state of peace, absence of fear, absence of pain, and a life surrounded by friends-threads of which remain with us today.

Then came Christianity, which said many things, one of which was that happiness will occur there and later as opposed to here and now. Life is unpleasant, but if you live it as an upstanding Christian, heaven awaits. Pleasure was the devil on earth, and pain in the form of humility and service was the path to a happy afterlife, a gift from God. Islam refined the concept to turning it into a struggle, the war between good and evil on earth, and one would be rewarded with happiness in the afterlife. And the Baha'i faith has its feet in both camps by stating that we humans are noble from the start and capable of continual spiritual growth both in this world and in the afterlife. So make the world a better place now and heaven a better place later.

The Eastern religions take a slightly different approach, by establishing the methods for achieving happiness now rather than later, because there is no later-at least, not the heaven of Western theology. Hinduism proffered the theory of reincarnation as a means of "getting it right"-that the goal of religion was to adhere to a way of stopping the process of death-rebirth (so you don't come back as a frog). Buddhism added specific practices allowing us to break free of this cycle to achieve "nirvana," or liberation. Thus, pleasure has historically been the cultural antagonist to achieving happiness. In terms of the science, nothing's changed.

Indeed, there is not one definition of "happiness." What it means to be happy is quite different, depending on the times in which you live, your religious and cultural affiliations, and likely the language you use. For instance, some languages define "happiness" as "good luck and favorable circumstances" (i.e., out of your control), while in others "happiness" refers to "favorable internal feeling states" (somewhat in your control). Obviously, this makes it very hard to write about, because the definitions and the criteria for inclusion have been a moving target.

Happy Endings?

Happiness is what most people say they really want: the spouse who can manage those things you can't; the house with the porch and the white picket fence; the two matched children (one boy, one girl) who get all the awards in high school and go on to Ivy League colleges; seeing the world with your family; having a retirement nest egg (I always liked the Prudential commercial with psychologist Dan Gilbert that states, "Retirement is paying yourself for what you like to do"); and growing old with your spouse without infirmity. Then again, most parents today simply wish for minimal psychiatric bills, no trips to rehab and no police record, good colleges on their...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101982942
ISBN 13 
9781101982945
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland

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