In today’s dopamine-driven culture, where attention has become the new currency, how is our brain being rewired – and what are the implications for communication, media consumption, and education? 
 

In today’s so-called “dopamine culture,” our brains are being rewired to seek constant, fast rewards – weakening our ability to focus and shortening the average attention span. Communication increasingly favors brief, emotionally charged messages; media become fragmented and distracting; and education must confront the challenge of moving beyond performance metrics. As Professor Andrea Gaggioli suggests, the answer isn’t to reject technology, but to rebuild meaning around it, through it, and because of it. Education should foster mental freedom – a space where students and teachers co-create learning experiences and imagine new futures together. 

Let’s begin this conversation by discussing a concept that has particularly dominated psychological, and user experience studies in recent years, namely the “dopamine culture.” Could you briefly explain how the dopaminergic cycle works and what this expression entails? 

In very simple terms, dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced by our brain. It plays a role in how we feel pleasure and rewards. It’s a significant part of our unique human ability to think and plan. It helps us focus, work toward goals, and find interesting things.  

The term "dopamine culture" refers to the fact that today people constantly seek more immediate gratification, especially in their use of technological devices. The pursuit of pleasure is fueled by the brain’s reward system, where dopamine plays a major role, among other mediators and neurotransmitters.  

Psychology and neuroscience have played a crucial role in shaping the scientific foundations behind the reward mechanisms that drive social networks and beyond: apps, notifications, online games, streaming platforms, and smartphones are designed to provide continuous and rapid stimuli, which trigger dopaminergic impulses, creating moments of pleasure that foster a form of addiction. This continual search for quick gratification significantly reduces the ability to maintain focus and attention or to engage in long or demanding activities.  

This collective cognitive shift resulting from the decline in attention has two main consequences: first, those who seek the attention of others must adapt to this limitation. Think, for example, of the length of advertisements: today, it’s impossible to consider running an ad longer than 30 seconds, given that the threshold for capturing attention is around 6 to 7 seconds.  

Another consequence of the reduced attention span is the emergence of compulsive behaviours like doomscrolling or binge-watching. Eminent scholars have warned about the impact of this on the mental health of young people – I'm thinking of Jonathan Haidt, B.J. Fogg and several others.   

In my view, the very notion of "dopamine culture" is paradoxical: dopamine is a neuroscientific concept associated with immediate gratification yet using it as a lens to define our era risks oversimplification. Explaining contemporary society solely in these terms offers a reductive perspective that falls short of capturing its complexity. In this sense, the concept of "dopamine culture" is itself a product of the very phenomenon it seeks to describe – an attempt to distill a multifaceted issue into the influence of a single molecule. 

How can we escape this vicious cycle?   

I believe we need to deepen our understanding of this issue by becoming more aware of the underlying cultural mechanisms and recognising that such critiques have a long history. Take, for example, the concept of the "attention economy" - essentially a precursor to the idea of "dopamine culture." This notion was first introduced by Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon in 1978, highlighting how attention itself has long been viewed as a scarce and exploitable resource. 

Simon had already noted that in a world rich in information, the scarce commodity isn’t the information itself but the human attention necessary to process it. From this comes his famous slogan: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”  

It seems to me that this prediction has come true. In the 1970s, there was no social media and no smartphones, yet it was already evident that an economy and a marketing system based on media were developing, and that media were devouring attention.  

Read the second part of the interview