The third way is through revelations via a system of sensations and subsequent beliefs - namely pain, pleasure, and emotional resonance (typically done through spiritual influence or religion).

A second way is through inference and our own innate ability to draw associations and conclusions - to take pieces of existing knowledge and combining them to reach new revelations. It is observed in the field of epistemology that there are a variety of unique ways to acquire knowledge: the first way is through perception, or what information is relayed to our brains through our five senses. The issue with this growing dependency on technology is its subtle - but nevertheless significant - alterations in the way people acquire knowledge and develop interactions with their world. After all, as humans become ever more reliant on technology to maintain order and efficiency in our lives and to facilitate the sharing of information and communication, it is impossible to expect smooth integration into society for individuals that cast away technology altogether. The issue with allowing our devices and digital outlets to dominate our world is not the medium through which this influence is imposed that is to say, the issue is not necessarily the electronics themselves. It didn’t matter to her that her cold hard cash was disappearing with each press of a button or pull of a lever the very sensation of doing so was the payoff. The woman recounts her early experiences in gambling, where she played for the possibility of winning big - but over time, the allure of gambling, the feeling of there being nothing but herself and the bright flashy machine in the world, became the primary motivator.

In her book, “Addiction by Design”, she cites the experiences of a woman she found sitting at a gambling booth who laughed when she was asked if she was going to win. How could an activity exist where the reward for a cost is the cost itself? How can an activity exist where there is a certainty of attendance and participation purely through the power of fruitless immersion? Ludic loops are powerful and mysterious things: by definition, the very concept doesn’t make sense. The term is derived from the Roman word “ludus”, which refers to the semantic field of play, and that’s precisely the medium where the term is most often found and used. She eventually boiled down the entire mechanical process of the gambler’s psyche to a key element of the mental process which she coined the “ludic loop”. Through nothing but a simple digital interface, these machines exploit their users’ desire for an escapist environment and a systematic isolation to cajole them into spending countless hours on an activity that ultimately has little possibility of paying them back. She fostered a strong interest in the relationship between technology and the influence of culture in the human experience, resolving to discover what precisely made gambling a nigh-perfect means of escapism. Dow Schüll is known best for her research regarding the addictive power of electronic slot machines and how their very design facilitates and encourages the compulsive behavior of gamblers.

Natasha Dow Schüll is a Cultural Anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. This hidden power is what spurred a cultural anthropologist by the name of Natasha Dow Schüll to travel to Las Vegas - the gambling capital of the world - and observe victims of this phenomena for a decade before returning to publish her findings on a state of being she coined the “ludic loop”. It’s a unique kind of hypnotism that occurs when we’re hooked into doing something that has no real reward, and the feeling of being trapped in that state of empty limbo becomes the reward in and of itself. It’s not quite addiction, though it shares many similarities with that state of mind. It’s a phenomenon that pervades us without our realizing, and it eats away at our lives without our even realizing it. There’s a unique feeling of being trapped without being trapped, of being intensely focused without focusing on anything in particular at all.

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