Opening Skinner's Box: Chapters 7 and 8

Chapter 7

One of the more important aspects of addiction that I don't believe was explored that much in the chapter is the non-addictive substances. Internet addiction, for instance, is one that is significantly more important these days even though it wasn't mentioned at all in this chapter.

Once I read a newspaper article which reported scientific findings about what made internet addiction, well, an addiction. Some believe that, in the case of the "checking e-mails" addiction (I suppose the more current version of this is in the "checking Facebook" addiction), there exists a particular substance secreted by the body when the person sees a new message. New message, new content, new thing, the person gets excited for a split second. This "excitement", some say, is addictive, because once people habitually get it each time they receive a "1 new message/update" notification, they begin to seek it out deliberately. This results in addiction, where people hopelessly continue to check their accounts in the hopes of getting this excitement.

These forms of addiction are strange, mostly because they don't involve substances. The internet is merely a tool for communication, not fundamentally unlike the telephone, but I certainly don't remember studies coming out in the early 1990s about how people were "addicted" to their house phones, unless you count people waiting for a phone call all day as "addicts", though I would argue if they knew for a fact that nobody would call that day, they wouldn't sit next to the phone. The same can't be said for Facebook, blogs, web forums, or emails. Messages that aren't even intended for them directly secrete the "excitement" signal immediately. This does, in some ways, reflect well on Alexander's ultimate theory. The internet isn't inherently addictive, much less on a chemical level, because there's really nothing consumed. At the same time, though, internet addiction is a very real thing, and one that can arise out of people's personal circumstances rather than any inherent property of the medium.

Chapter 8

I found this chapter to be very interesting, mostly out of my ignorance of this kind of phenomenon. I did not think about the possibility of "implanted" memories that are fabricated entirely by a person, followed by the subject then crafting a completely fictitious set of "memories" from that seed.

But in this particular chapter, Slater concentrates a large portion of her writing to "repressed memories", or rather traumatic negative events. Wouldn't this phenomenon be also present in neutral and positive events? What is the ratio of great memories to horrible ones, and can the positive ones be manipulated just as easily?

There seems to be a bit of a greater thing hidden behind the experiments that Slater presented and what they implied. It is possible for memories to actually change entirely, with a mind so malleable that anything can be fabricated on the spot with the right prompt. If this can be exploited to a large extent, can we retroactively change memories entirely? If this is the case, this might be of even more significance, since many people base their behaviors sometimes on past memories. Can we change current behaviors by changing the memories, or are memories with these kinds of links completely intact?

I believe that this subject is significantly more intriguing than what was originally presented, but perhaps these questions were explored and no meaningful answer was given.