From music and movies to video games and porn, creators and psychologists explain why some cultural experiences hit your nervous system like a substance.
Spanish philosopher Antonio Escohotado used to say that we often play with drugs to manipulate our psyche like a pianist would play the notes on a keyboard. Tap-tap-tap. With a little help, the puppeteer of the mundane can also manipulate the universal. And as humans are creatures of rituals, protocols, and confinement, imagination can be their escape route to other possible worlds.
Have you by chance ever played Cyberpunk 2077 on PlayStation 5? Experienced firsthand that viscous nectar of dystopia and decadence? Cyberpunk 2077 is a video game flooded with drugs, with substances that loom between sensory experience, mental escapism, and the power of abilities. And behind that joystick, pressing those buttons, wielding those fingers, controlling that character, lies the consciousness that precedes existence: could the imagination work like psychoactive substances do?
Even if you’ve never touched a controller, you’ve felt the same thing after a song, a film, a novel, a painting, or a scene that rearranged your mood in seconds.
In that sense, psychology suggests that the rewards we get from cultural products (music, film, video games, literature, you name it) are similar to those obtained by consuming certain substances. Basically, because the biological basis is the same. Let’s return to Cyberpunk 2077: the game’s chemistry produces a mental chemistry. As the American writer George William Curtis said, “Imagination is as good as many voyages… and how much cheaper!” With a balanced energy, a little bit of PlayStation gaming can evoke shivers worthy of the finest metaphysical abstractions.
However, psychologist and video game expert Nicolás Crescenzi offers some specific considerations: “It’s like saying ‘anything with a wheel is a vehicle,’ and that’s …
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Author: Hernán Panessi / High Times
