Alan Greenblatt's Impact Of The Internet On Thinking

Initially people around the world and scientists have come to believe that people can become addicted to the internet. In Alan Greenblatt’s Impact of the Internet on Thinking: Is the Web Changing the Way We Think? ; Hilarie Cash, who runs a treatment center for Internet and video game addiction in Redmond, Washington, says that “both China and South Korea have named Internet addiction as primary public-health concerns (Greenblatt 11).” Although in some places they consider internet addiction as a health concern, there are many who do not consider internet addiction as one. The standard diagnostic manual for mental disorders does not consider excessive internet use as an addiction because it is not rooted in a chemical basis, like with drugs and alcohol (Greenblatt 11). Why wouldn’t they consider it an addiction? Internet addiction is rooted to a chemical basis because when using the internet the brain produces dopamine, a compound present in the body as a neurotransmitter, which is a chemical that is produced in the brain when someone sees something they like or excites them when opening social media …show more content…
In our brains there is a system called controlled attention, which is used to keep going forward with something even if it seems impossible, one could say that it’s kind of like a “nightclub bouncer”. The nightclub bouncer is what prevents irrelevant stuff from getting into working memory- the ability to juggle facts and perform mental operations- and while the nightclub bouncer is doing that the globus pallidus is highly active and proactively fending off distractions (Glenn 4). Some people are better than others at not being easily distracted. People with strong working-memory capacities don’t have a large nightclub; they just have better bouncers working the velvet rope outside (Glenn