Internet Addiction Affects Your Brain Like Alcohol and Drugs Do

We know that internet addiction is a real disorder, but did you know if affects your brain in much the same way as alcohol and drugs?

Internet addiction can causes changes to your brain similar to those normally found in people addicted alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana, according to a new study.

Researchers in China scanned the brains of 17 web addicts and discovered that they all had abnormal “white matter”, the biological insulation between neurons. This drastically changed their brains’ wiring.

The scans were compared with that of 16 individuals who were not addicted.

The findings, which were published in the journal PLoS, revealed that the changes were similar to brain changes seen in people addicted to alcohol and cocaine.

“Overall, our findings indicate that IAD [internet addiction disorder] has abnormal white matter integrity in brain regions involving emotional generation and processing, executive attention, decision-making and cognitive control,” said head researcher Dr. Hao Lei.

Approximately 5 to 10 percent of people who use the internet are thought to be addicted, with most of those individuals being hardcore gamers who play for hours without food, drink, or sleep.

“The majority of people we see with serious internet addiction are gamers — people who spend long hours in roles in various games that cause them to disregard their obligations,” said psychiatrist Henrietta Bowden Jones.

“I have seen people who stopped attending university lectures, failed their degrees or their marriages broke down because they were unable to emotionally connect with anything outside the game,” she said.

“When someone comes to you and says they did not sleep last night because they spent 14 hours playing games, and it was the same the previous night, and they tried to stop but they couldn’t — you know they have a problem,” Bowden Jones added.

Some are questioning the results of the study, though, saying that stimulants may have contributed to the drastic changes within the brain.

“The limitations [of this study] are that it is not controlled, and it’s possible that illicit drugs, alcohol or other caffeine-based stimulants might account for the changes. The specificity of ‘internet addiction disorder’ is also questionable,” said Professor Michael Farrell, director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

The new research provides additional insight into how some people may be more susceptible to addiction because of the way their brains work, said Gordon Harris, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School.

“It’s not just a personal failing or weakness,” Harris said.

Related articles

• Can Internet Addiction Affect Brain Structure? (blogs.wsj.com)
• Does Internet Addiction Disorder change teens’ brains? (mnn.com)
• Internet, It’s a Helluva Drug: Internet Addiction Has Same Effect as Cocaine on Brain (inquisitr.com)