Simon Sinek uses rat experiments to argue that isolation drives addiction while strong friendships protect against it. When rats lived in enriched social environments, they didn't become addicted to drugs; isolated rats did. He connects this to modern loneliness and suggests teaching kids friendship skills as prevention.
Chapters
Why would you care about friendship on like a global scale? What's in it, Simon? What's happening? Our understanding of addiction largely comes from an experiment that was done I think in like the 50s or 60s where they put a rat in a cage. There was one thing of water, where it was plain water and one thing that was laced with drugs, right? And in short order the rat discovered the drug laced beverage and loved it, drank more and more until it killed itself. And our understanding of addiction largely comes from this study. There was a guy named, I think his name was Bruce Alexander who said, hold on, it's flawed. The whole study is flawed. Because rats like us are social animals. And we put a rat by itself in solitude. Of course it became an addict, but that's not what you're supposed to do with social animals. So he recreated the experiment where he put like, first of all, he put lots of rats in the cage. So social community, they put wheels and mazes and they were having kids and babies and two waters, a plain water and the drug laced water. And they could see from the data they knew which ones and they all tried enough of the drug laced water to get addicted, but they didn't. Their taking in of the water declined and they only drank the plain water. Which starts to give evidence that if we have close friendships and if we live in community, perhaps we're less susceptible to all addiction. And I know that there's a lot being talked about about the addiction of social media, the addiction of cell phones, which is true, which is true. It is a highly dopamine producing device and that it's causing loneliness. And I would argue that if we worked on the friendships and more important if we taught our children how to be friends, that perhaps they are less likely to get add.
