Dopamining
Yesterday I listened to a podcast about dopamine and the other ‘feel-good’ brain hormones oxytocin, seratonin and endorphins. It feels kind of like cheating to include endorphins as a single thing when there are actually a bunch of different endorphins, but it means you get to use the cool acronym DOSE so I can’t begrudge the neuroscientists too much for it. Or should it be the neuropsychologists? The brain people.
The main thrust of the podcast is to describe the ways in which modern life, in particular the way we use our phones, has perfected the art of removing and reducing our production of these hormones, and offering some solutions for dealing with this.
We all know that we are on our phones far too much, and yet we continue to be on our phones far too much.
The little dopmaine hit you get from reading a tweet or scrolling TikTok or watching a hundred Instagram reels is a lot easier to get than the satisfaction you get from reading a book or practicing guitar, and it staves off the boredom that arises if you just sit there with, god forbid, nothing to do but think.
But you are never satisfied when you stop watching the Instagram reels, or when you finish a session of playing 5-minute blitz chess matches while waiting for the bus. You always want more. If you’ve played five matches you want to play five more. If you’ve watched thirty reels you want to watch thirty more.
This feeling then carries over into the moments when we are not on our phones too, because we have crashed our supply of dopamine meaning that it is harder to achieve the non-phone-based things we want to do, like cooking dinner or building a spreadsheet. So we go back on our phone and order something from Deliveroo then play a few more games of chess while we’re waiting for the food to arrive.
We started the day with the intention of planning a holiday and assembling a bookshelf, but after we woke up and spent twenty minutes on YouTube shorts there was no motivation left for anything else.
Why, then, am I telling you this when I have posted this article on Twitter with the intention of hijacking your attention for the brief fix of a University Challenge review?
Because I am part of the problem too.
I am trying to steal your dopamine for my own selfish social media ambitions, to steal your motivation and get you hooked on these reviews just like Facebook is. The only difference is that I haven’t used your data to become a billionaire.
So if you’ve come to me from Twitter then get off here now — leave your phone and your headphones behind and go find the nearest tree. Stare at it, touch it if you like, then come back and tell me how you feel.
Ah, I forgot one step — subscribe to the blog so that you don’t need to rely on Twitter’s increasingly spiteful algorithm to find me. Instead I will arrive fully formed in your email inbox and you can read me at your leisure.
Sign up for The University Challenge Review
Next week we can deal with oxytocin, but for now, let’s get on with the episode.
Darwin College, Cambridge vs Birkbeck.
This is Darwin’s third appearance on the Challenge, losing a tight semi-final to St Edmund Hall on their debut in 2019. Birkbeck won the trophy in 2003, but didn’t appear again until 2020, and they have made two quarter-finals since then
Here’s your first starter for ten
Darwin captain Whitaker takes the opening points with Where Angels Fear To Tread, setting the tone for the rest of the match. His team is made up of three women, and the Birkbeck team also has two women, meaning that the men are numerically outnumbered, which is quite a rare occurrence.
Darwin take two bonuses on cities with two Zs in their names and Skidmore (who had introduced himself as being originally from Salford, as if he was playing for Salford, rather than Birkbeck) gets Birkbeck off the mark with Whig. They tied the game with two bonuses on Jane Austen and Shakespeare, before Whitaker took his second with Marina Abramovich.
The picture starter also goes to Whitaker. That’s three for him — it’s going to get more difficult to keep trackas the show goes on.
Van Onzenoort bounces back for Birkbeck with elasticity, and they mixed up their answers on glass-making processes, giving super-cooling twice rather than tempering and annealing. A second for Van Onzenoort wins Birkbeck a bonus set on Sicilian foods, including one on cakes which Skidmore isn’t much help on because he’s ‘not that into cakes’.
The third answer is cannoli, and Evans turns to Skidmore before he gives Rajan their answer, saying ‘The Godfather’. Its not clear to me whether he’s calling Skidmore The Godfather, or saying that they eat cannolis in the film The Godfather. Either way it made me laugh.
Hamilton gives Whitaker his fourth starter of the night, and Max Factor (who was apparently a real person, after whom the makeup brand is named) continues his streak.
Evans takes the music starter with Frank Sinatra, but they can’t maintain the momentum and Whitaker returns with David Hume.
Van Onzenoort keeps Birkbeck in it with Bayes, and Evans grabs the second picture starter to close the gap even further. When Moorthy takes her first points with All Quiet on the Western Front they are only 25-points behind.
Whitakeover
But it is at this stage that Whitaker takes complete control of the match for Darwin, with four starters back to back on a wide variety of subjects (Venus, Albanian refugees in Italy, Salisbury Cathedral and the 800s).
Have you been counting? I might have missed one out so I’ll just tell you — he finished with eleven (11!) starters, which is the highest of the series so far.
He was also the only person on his team to get a starter, which might be a record of some sort. Look out for him in the next round!
Darwin 205–110 Birkbeck
I hadn’t realised quite how impressive Whitaker was until I saw all of his plaudits on social media, but eleven starters is a stonking performance, and Birkbeck couldn’t keep up with him at all.
In fact, his points from starters alone would have tied Birkbeck’s total.
See you next week (by which time you’ll all have subscribed so you don’t have to crash your dopamine supplies on Twitter) for Durham vs Oriel, a rematch of the 2000 Grand Final.
