Engineering $$Billion Behavioral Addictions

medium |  Yin asked not to be identified by her real name. A young addict in her mid-twenties, she lives in Palo Alto and, despite her addiction, attends Stanford University.

She has all the composure and polish you’d expect of a student at a prestigious school, yet she succumbs to her habit throughout the day. She can’t help it; she’s compulsively hooked.

Yin is an Instagram addict. The photo sharing social network, recently purchased by Facebook for $1 billion, captured the minds of Yin and 40 million others like her.

The acquisition demonstrates the increasing importance–and immense value created by–habit-forming technologies. Of course, the Instagram purchase price was driven by a host of factors including a rumored bidding war for the company.

But at its core, Instagram is the latest example of an enterprising team, conversant in psychology as much as technology, that unleashed an addictive product on users who made it part of their daily routines.

Like all addicts, Yin doesn’t realize she’s hooked. “It’s just fun,” she says as she captures her latest in a collection of moody snapshots reminiscent of the late 1970s. “I don’t have a problem or anything.

I just use it whenever I see something cool. I feel I need to grab it before it’s gone.”

The Brain's Lymphatic System

theatlantic  |  Reich started his search in 2015, after a major study in Nature reported a similar conduit for lymph in mice. The University of Virginia team wrote at the time, “The discovery of the central-nervous-system lymphatic system may call for a reassessment of basic assumptions in neuroimmunology.” The study was regarded as a potential breakthrough in understanding how neurodegenerative disease is associated with the immune system.

Around the same time, researchers discovered fluid in the brains of mice and humans that would become known as the “glymphatic system.” It was described by a team at the University of Rochester in 2015 as not just the brain’s “waste-clearance system,” but as potentially helping fuel the brain by transporting glucose, lipids, amino acids, and neurotransmitters. Although since “the central nervous system completely lacks conventional lymphatic vessels,” the researchers wrote at the time, it remained unclear how this fluid communicated with the rest of the body.

Reich reasoned that since this fluid exists in human brains, and the conduits exist in mice, the conduits likely exist in humans, too. After two years of work and inordinately complex physics calculations, Reich’s team found the vessels. When Reich started telling colleagues what his team found, he got two reactions: “No way, it’s not true,” and “Yeah, we’ve known that.”

There are occasional references to the idea of a lymphatic system in the brain in historic literature. Two centuries ago, the anatomist Paolo Mascagni made full-body models of the lymphatic system that included the brain, though this was dismissed as an error. A historical account in The Lancet in 2003 read: “Mascagni was probably so impressed with the lymphatic system that he saw lymph vessels even where they did not exist—in the brain.”

No one had published definitive evidence of lymph vessels in any brain until the Virginia mouse study and a concordant Helsinki one in 2015. “You could say that was the discovery,” Reich said. “Did Newton discover gravity? I mean—not to equate these two discoveries—but obviously people knew that things fell before Newton’s apple.”

His team’s discovery, though, not only shows that the vessels exist in people, but just how elaborate the system is.

Las Vegas Mass Shooting's Point of Commonality?

theduran |  Until governments such as that of the United States, cracks down on big pharmaceutical companies, black-market drug dealers and the deep state’s involvement in narcotics trafficking, things will only get worse. It is no coincidence that the number of mass shootings as well as cruel and usual homicides have increased in-line with the use of psychotropic drugs.

Furthermore, society must work diligently to stigmatise drug use until such a point where being a drug addict is socially derided to the same degree as being a member of a known terrorist organisation.

The following is a list compiled by WND news, detailing the mass shooters and other obviously insane killers, known to be taking psychotropic drugs prior to or during their killing sprees: