THE NEW “AMBIENT THREATS” THAT HIJACK THE NEURAL CIRCUITS OF AVOIDANCE TO CREATE ADDICTION

liviupoenaru
18 déc. 2025
3 min de lecture

Dec. 10, 2025

THE MENTAL FORECAST

A new category of threat has entered human experience — not catastrophic or dramatic, but ambient, continuous, and built into the architecture of digital life. Neuroscience shows that even the anticipation of potential danger suppresses parietal-occipital alpha and central mu rhythms, preparing the organism for defensive action and heightening responsivity in individuals with elevated anxiety traits (Mirifar et al., 2025). In ancestral contexts, such anticipatory states were rare and useful. In contemporary digital environments, they are permanent. Sudden metric drops, ambiguous notifications, delayed responses, algorithmic volatility — these are subtle cues that the nervous system cannot distinguish from real uncertainty.

This transformation becomes clearer when considering the biology of perception. Research on alpha-band oscillations shows that emotionally salient stimuli — signals of comparison, anticipation, exposure, judgment — intensify perceptual suppression and push attention toward rapid, automatic pathways (Codispoti et al., 2023). Digital platforms operate precisely at this threshold. Every shift in visibility, every unread message, every fragment of social evaluation functions as a micro-signal of consequence. The organism responds with micro-fight (reactivity, defensive checking), micro-flight (avoidance through compulsive scrolling), or micro-freeze (hesitation under conditions of exposure). The fight–flight–freeze triad, once a survival mechanism, becomes a continuous behavioral infrastructure (Poenaru, 2023). Contemporary economic and algorithmic codes exploit this triad, converting ancient defensive mechanisms into predictable engagement loops.

This is why avoidance becomes addiction. In the natural world, the defensive triad switches off when danger disappears. Online, danger never fully disappears — it only fluctuates. The intermittent relief that follows micro-threats becomes the “reward.” The organism seeks not pleasure but regulation of tension. This explains why even a short reduction in exposure — such as a one-week social-media detox — produces rapid improvements in anxiety, mood, and sleep quality (Calvert et al., 2025). When the artificial threat architecture is interrupted, the defensive system recalibrates quickly.

On a population level, these dynamics accumulate. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis, synthesizing recent evidence across adolescent and young adult populations, demonstrates consistent associations between social-media use and mental-health disorders (Cabezas-Klinger et al., 2025). The findings reflect not individual fragility but environmental conditioning: exposure increases comparison, comparison increases vigilance, vigilance drives compulsive checking, and compulsive checking deepens exposure. The loop is structural. Addiction arises not from a pursuit of reward but from the need to manage ever-present micro-threats embedded within platform design.

These dynamics are intensified by the cognitive cost of reading on screens rather than paper. Evidence shows that screen-based reading increases cognitive load, reduces comprehension, and amplifies distractibility compared to reading on paper (Clinton, 2019). The digital screen becomes not just a medium but a physiological environment — one that strains attention, heightens vigilance, and reinforces the instability exploited by digital infrastructures.

Taken together, these phenomena form the landscape of ambient threats: subtle, continuous, algorithmically distributed pressures that infiltrate the circuits of avoidance, reward, attention, and identity. They do not overwhelm; they erode. They do not shock; they saturate. Their strength lies in their invisibility — in the way they appropriate neural systems built for survival and repurpose them as engines of engagement.

The oscillatory signatures seen in controlled threat experiments mirror the rhythms of digital life. The psychological improvements that follow reduced exposure highlight how artificially these pressures are manufactured. Mental well-being today cannot be separated from the infrastructures that convert biological defense into addictive behavior and rewrite the grammar of the nervous system for economic ends.

Liviu Poenaru

References

Mirifar, A., Stegmann, Y., Engle, H., et al. (2025). Active avoidance of potential threat is reflected in oscillatory brain activity. Scientific Reports, 15, 43303.

Codispoti, M., De Cesarei, A., & Ferrari, V. (2023). Alpha-band oscillations and emotion: A review of studies on picture perception. Psychophysiology, 60(12), e14438.

Calvert, E., Cipriani, M., Dwyer, B., et al. (2025). Social Media Detox and Youth Mental Health. JAMA Network Open, 8(11), e2545245.

Clinton, V. (2019). Reading from paper compared to screens: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Reading, 42(2), 288–325.

Montag, C., & Hegelich, S. (2020). Understanding detrimental aspects of social media use: Will the real culprits please stand up? Frontiers in Sociology, 5, Article 599270.

Cabezas-Klinger, H., Fernandez-Daza, F. F., & Mina-Paz, Y. (2025). Associations Between Social Media Use and Mental Disorders in Adolescents and Young Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Recent Evidence. Behavioral Sciences, 15(11), 1450.

Poenaru, L. (2023). Inconscient économique. Paris: L’Harmattan.