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This statement is a sign of intellectual naiveté. An addiction to intellectual pursuits does not offer the same high as injecting yourself with heroin. The sens
by crimsonalucard 11y ago
This statement is a sign of intellectual naiveté. An addiction to intellectual pursuits does not offer the same high as injecting yourself with heroin. The sense and intensity of euphoria are dramatically different.
The nature of the addiction is also different. Being addicted to a drug is entirely different from being addicted to doing math. You don't get the shakes, or feel intense pain or suffer from withdrawal when you don't do math for a couple months.
This article only offers intellectual stimulus as potential treatment for addiction, not a drug replacement. Are people really so smug as to delude themselves into thinking that they're of the nature that solving a math problem is like doing a line of coke? Lets be real.
- darkmighty 11y agoA fair point, but I was being more specific. I meant if you even look at the active principles of most drugs, they stimulate hormonal responses and perhaps directly things we call "satisfying". So it's not a question of naiveness or not, it's the technical question on what distinguishes satisfaction generated by a drug, by a sport or by intellectual pursuit. For example, sports practice directly releases endorphins, which as the name says, is an endogenous morphin. If they can't be fundamentally distinguished from a stimulatory point of view (my hypothesis), I'd say what distinguishes a drug to some activity we don't regard as addictive is simply that one is sustainable, leads to long term benefits while the other is unsustainable.
- girvo 11y agoYou're misunderstanding the magnitude of difference that exogenous opioids have to endorphins. They're on a completely different level, and comparing them is futile other than in the abstract.