What's surprising aren't the findings of both articles, but that mass media is so late getting to information that psych researchers have been writing about for the last few years.  There is an abundance of scientific reports linking on-line gaming, video game addiction, on-line gambling, internet surfing, texting, cell phone compulsion and brain chemistry changes. Google on-line gaming and dopamine and find dozens of articles, i.e.:  Dopamine, a “feel good receptor” chemical in the brain, increases during times of pleasure. Pleasure, for video game addicts, comes in the form of gaming. Dopamine levels are at their highest in a game addict’s brain during time spent gaming. Sabine Grüsser, of the Cherité University Medicine Berlin, says, “It’s the same mechanism in all addicts.” Grüsser also claims that gaming eventually becomes the only activity in a gamer’s life that can increase dopamine levels and is a physiological explanation for the addiction. ---Virtual Addiction, the Hidden Dangers of Online Gaming.

However, the wisest experts will always know less than you know.  If you have found yourself unable to restrain yourself in relation to your digital devices; if you feel more chronically tired than you once did; if you are frightened for your hooked-up children - and yourself - then you know.  You may be longing for an antidote to a drug that is terrifyingly easy to administer.  If that's the case, here is an elixir.  It is less easy to take in.  

Read the poem once.  Read it again.  Print it out.  Then, log off and go outside. City or country; NY street or rural backyard; suburban front step or high rise roof.  Take you and the poem out under the sky.  Read the poem again. Then, do your best to do nothing.  It will be difficult, perhaps even impossible. It may be worth it.

I was racing to meet deadlines and get to the day job and shoot marketing e-mails to a friend for a benefit writing workshop I'm teaching in Reno and grate apples for apples and yogurt and slam coffee and and and...  I made myself stop.  I opened my daily meditation book and found this:

Pursue thought;  

Put on a lined cape      

And go outside

Far from the silent houses, lit by lamps...

Along the path,

the gaze of the moon follows you.      

The tangled branches       

There on the snow           

Mark out the signs           

Of your thoughts.

     ---Francois Cheng, in Awakenings, a collection by Danielle and Olivier Follini

I copied the medicine-poem into emails for a few friends - and then I wrote this post.