When Dr. Kang asserts that digital apps and gadgets are “engineered” to hit children’s brains with bursts of dopamine, she is being very precise. “The phone,” she told me, “has been designed by the world’s top neuroscientists and psychologists, who have taken all of our most sophisticated brain research and understanding of human motivation and reward cycles and have embedded it into devices.” She cited as an example a company with a name and mission so on the nose that one would think it came out of a satirical film or novel: Dopamine Labs. “It was started,” she said, “by a neuroscientist and
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