Dopamine! It’s not just for breakfast anymore. Technically, you eat it with every meal. You invite it along when you go shopping, it’s with you when you’re having sex, when you’re handing in a completed project, and it plays a supporting role in the hit AMC series, Breaking Bad.
4-(2-aminoethyl)benzene-1,2-diol (as the kids are most certainly not calling it these days) is a neurotransmitter often linked with learning and rewarding behaviors. It’s also one of the elements that makes TruScribe whiteboard animation videos so fun to watch.
So here’s how it works in TruScribe videos. When you see the hand moving across the white screen, it begins to draw … something. In the time between when the first line appears and the image is completed, your brain is trying to anticipate what the final form is going to be.
When the final form is revealed the brain experiences SURPRISE and releases dopamine.
*pop*
Experiencing the unexpected increases the levels of dopamine in the brain, which is a pleasure chemical and in turn increases the engagement of the viewer, making our videos pleasing to watch and effective at transferring your message.
So how does that connect to Breaking Bad?
Well, meth works by amplifying the effects of dopamine in the brains of the addict. Meth (or Blue Sky, as it’s coined in the show) is a stimulant which has a number of practical applications, like if you need to dig a hole in your front yard for some reason or if you don’t want to sleep for the rest of the week. The use of meth is extremely rewarding to the users and keeps them coming back for more.
But unlike TruScribe Videos, its effects on the body are mostly disastrous, including the destruction of tissues and blood vessels, making the body unable to heal itself, and the loss of elasticity of the skin, causing users to appear much older than they are. With all the marks in the negativity, it astounds and amazes the sober among us that anyone would run the gambit of risks for the benefits of the experience. And yet the benefits are right there in the dopamine receptors. Meth floods the system with the stuff, and the user feels a surge of pleasure and a prolonged sense of euphoria.
Here’s a better way to connect TruScribe whiteboard videos with this popular show.
While Breaking Bad explores the ramifications of a quiet milquetoast suburbanite father and husband deciding to veer off the path of civility and human kindness into the drug trade and its many dangers, the show itself delivers this same dopamine response through its narrative. It’s a show built around surprises: surprises in plot, in the development of character, in all its twists and turns. The writers have a knack for painting their leads into a corner, and they do this not knowing at the outset what will save their protagonists from jail, or torture, or an awful death at the end of a silvery axe. When those surprises come in frequent and unexpected ways, the dopamine comes with it, pleasurable, euphoric and in the case of Breaking Bad, relentless heartbreaking.
And it was all over on September 13, 2013. The withdrawal was intense, and prolonged.
Hopefully you started watching more TruScribe videos.
