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Gene Therapy Turns Slackers Into Workaholics
DrLudicrous writes "According to a recent Reuters article, scientists have been able to cause monkeys to stop procrastinating by blocking the development of a dopamine receptor in the brain. The net result- the monkeys turned into workaholics. An article has appeared in the online version of Nature. Apparently, monkeys, just like human beings, tend to slack off on tasks until the very last minute. They become quite adept at judging how long they have till they absolutely must complete these tasks. The original article appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. An additional blurb appears here courtesty of Science Blog." NIH has a press release.
The reason the monkeys worked harder was that they could no longer judge how much work had to be done before they got a reward. Essentially, they became unable to estimate how long the work would take to complete. I don't think this has any practical application for humans. It's just helpful for understanding existing human mental disorders.
If it wasn't for procrastination, would there even be a slashdot? I mean, how many of you out there are at work right now reading this when you really should be doing something else... Just throwing that into the mix.
Your mammas flamebait.
I have read the article and I think the headline is a bit misleading. Blocking the dopamine made the monkeys pull the lever quicker because they couldn't make decisions properly. It didn't motivate them or make them super-workers, it just messed with how they think so they wouldn't hesitate to pull a lever.
Later on in the article, it mentions how people with mental disorders cannot associate work with reward. It goes on to say that people with mania will often work very hard to a futile reward. Sort of like monkeys who pull levers all day.
In other words, have they created manic monkeys?