Decoding the selfie-taker

Fired by the desire to beat National Football League star Patrick Peterson's Guinness World record of 1,449 selfies in an hour, Bhanu Prakash Racha quit his job as a research assistant with a Hyderabad hospital so he could have more time to practise. He eventually clicked 1,800 selfies in an hour.

This was in 2015. And while the 24-year-old may have few competitors as far as numbers go, he certainly represents the contemporary obsession with capturing every moment, however fleeting, on a digital screen.

You don't have to search far to find others like Racha. Selfie-takers are all over — on railway platforms, in malls, cars, offices, planes, even washrooms.

'Selfitis' disorder

In her new book, I Selfie Therefore I Am, renowned French psychoanalyst and philosopher Elsa Godart estimates that an average millennial will take 25,700 selfies in his or her lifetime.

"You might have heard the adage, 'an apple a day keeps the doctor away!' The same goes for selfies; it keeps my bad mood away," says Rohan Francis, who works with a multi-national company in Indore.

Francis takes at least 15-20 shots to get one "perfect selfie" each day. The 24-year-old believes that a person who is inactive on social media is a lost person or "the long-time-no-see types".

His mood, says Francis, is directly proportional to the number of likes his selfies get. "I delete the selfie with fewer likes. It affects my popularity," he admits.

According to a study by Psychology Today, such selfie obsession is linked to mental illness. "People who are more likely to show off with selfies have higher narcissism and psychopathy," according to the study. Likening it to an addiction, psychologist and hypnotherapist Dr Prashant Bhimani says it is attention seeking behaviour. Selfie addicts want to project themselves as superior and, in some cases, try to compare themselves with celebrities. "Selfie addiction can lead to mental illness and insomnia. When the desire of getting a specific number of 'likes' or 'comments' on a selfie is not fulfilled, it pushes a person towards depression, which in turn gives rise to suicidal tendencies," says Dr Bhimani, recalling the case of a patient, a teen from an affluent family, who went into depression because her selfies didn't get as many 'likes' as her friend's did on social media.

Experts also suggest that selfie-takers suffer from a sense of inadequacy, constantly seeking gratification through the images they project on the digital screen.

"The digital world is turning a person more and more outwards, into oneself and selfies are yet another facet of this trend," says Biju Dominic, CEO, Final Mile Consulting, that studies human behaviour by deriving from cognitive neuroscience, behavioural economics and design. "With the selfie, the person is more 'in control' of the photo-taking-process and so tends to like the output from it much more."

According to Dominic, the two strong psychological drivers of selfie addiction are a feeling of narcissism and having a sense of control over how one looks.

Besides, with a selfie, one documents oneself far more. Earlier, the brain had a natural way of forgetting the unimportant. These days, human behaviour experts are contemplating whether recording too many memories is good or bad, he says.

Mood lifter

For Shivani Chouhan, a Mumbai-based company secretary who takes at least five selfies every day, clicking selfies is a way to kill "boredom". Unlike Francis, the number of 'likes' don't affect her mood, yet the self-proclaimed attention seeker feels encouraged to take more selfies when people appreciate her photos, admits the 25-year-old.

The feel good factor that selfies provide, however temporary, has a scientific basis. The number of 'likes' on a picture, releases dopamine, a 'feel-good' neurotransmitter in the brain that plays a major role in reward-motivated behaviour. This is the same chemical that is released when a person drinks alcohol, smokes or does drugs.

Like most things, Dr Bhimani feels that selfie-taking will have its tipping point, following which the fad will ebb. "It's a kind of a wave that will go off gradually, maybe in a few years but it will peter out for sure," he adds.

Until then, suffer the selfie-takers.