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The Biochemistry of Searching the Internet
Slate is running a story about how searching the internet and keeping up with events through instant communication can fulfill biochemical needs within our brains. Research has shown that anticipation and simply "wanting" can stimulate dopamine production in the brain, and an internet full of answers plays right into that. Quoting:
"For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing. ... The dopamine circuits 'promote states of eagerness and directed purpose,' Panksepp writes. It's a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused — cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it."
First Post!
First reply!
Endorphins looping!
Searching fulfills the dopamine drive in our brains..... Why do I think that Rule 34 applies here?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
First mod parent up post !
This IS better than sex.
And I'm spent.
The article says you're all addicted to your posting behaviour ... maybe you can find *someone* to sue for being an enabler? After all, you deserve to be rewarded for your lack of impulse control | your bailout | welfare at least as much as GM and Wall Street.
Oh god are you trolling me ?
Trolling ?
OH GOD YES YES TROLL MORE !
And I'm a Methampgoogle addict.
I'm about to shoot up. I'm feeling lucky...
Each and every thing we do fulfills biochemical needs within our brains.
The dopamine system is great for sending the signals that a prehistoric smartaleck apeman needs up from the lizard brain without needing culture or language or any real reasoning.
Just good vibes to tell us we our meeting our survival minimums.
These impulses work for the hunter-gatherer of the Olduvai or the 21st-century equivalent. And although near universal, the domapine system is a great inkblot for all kinds of projection of bad values and druggie-type bad behviours, when it works the same way for all behaviours good bad and in between.
First contrats post for using both you're and your correctly in the same sentence
For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs.
errr, yes it is?
I think most internet activity could fall under this banner. The internet is another form of entertainment, like cable was years ago and still is today to a lesser degree. What I find truely interesting is that internet denizens have access to more: more browser tabs, more processor cores, more gigahertz, more bandwidth to accomplish the same old three tasks. When people reach informational saturation and miss a live conversation I hear them exclaim, "sorry I was multitasking", but it's just an excuse for mismanaged prioities. I heard an NPR segment recently where people that were asked to remember a 7 digit string of numbers were suddenly faced with deciding on a healthy piece of fruit or a slice of cake, and others had to remember a shorter string of numbers. The test data showed that by a large margin more data juggled tended to override sensibility (the fruit) and cause an impuse to satisfy desire (the cake). I think this paradigm fits in nicely with the desire to surf the net and satisfy a need. Again it's another situation where a majority of people are experiencing data overflow and getting productive work done and give in to the feel good reward of surfing the internet for fun. I suspect that people who interrupt a live conversation to check a text message or respond to an instant message are attempting to multitask but end up putting one conversation on hold in order to respond to another. Yet let the boss walk by while his workers are surfing the latest Hollywood fashion news and watch those browser windows minimize! Those employees weren't multitasking they were feeding the impuse beast.
Then why do some people act as if discovering and learning were *painful*? I see clearly the point mentioned in the summary - learning gives me almost a rush. But the people who refuse to read the manual, refuse to use a search engine, and refuse to read the error message on the dialog box on their screen, these people act as if they were wired backwards. I've seen people who would rather endure physical agony than to spend one minute learning with their brain.
This could lead to the most significant discovery in sociology ever. We now know why some people derive pleasure from learning. Now find out why the other kind experience only pain.
that the comments on this posting would be all meta FTW.
After all, I *am* in New York City.
So I guess this explains how looking at random stuff on the Internet can keep me up all night? As in, "Holy crap, it's 7 AM already?"
Then again, some of the stuff you'd see on 4chan or YouTube probably won't let you sleep, either. ;)
"He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing"
Hmmm... Intellectual Connections, Nope, That doesn't explain facebook or twitter... NEXT!
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Enter this site: American Literacy. They just ignore that 30% of people uses firefox to surf the net! And they order them to use MSIE!
Whoa! How can they do it in 2009? Those bastards should be banned!
Dont you dare tell the chinese government. They will get legitimate reason for torture to cure internet addiction.
... than Google and Crackberries. It's about lusting for someone, then being only mildly satisfied once we have what we wanted. Also about grown cats releasing their prey to keep "playing" with it. Addictions and hoarding behaviour too - knowing when we have enough and looking for more will bring no additional reward (huge, über-complete MP3 collections?). Go read it, it's worthy.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
So true. But I doubt chopping up a search-engine with a credit-card and snorting it through a rolled-up $100 off you girlfriend's ass will tingle your "dopamine circuits" in quite the same way -- although that voice on the old Yahoo! ads always seemed pretty excited.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
about shamwow, i mean andreessen's new browser.
the frame will consist of flashing and scintillating light patterns, with the occassional overlay of 'you're a winner' when arriving at a site, running a search engine search, or out in bboard land.
hmmm, today's captcha is 'playable'. noy sure if it's the nsa or skynet.......
Check out the tab explosion at xkcd. It's straight to the point.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
I search the internet for biochemistry.
Yours In Foo,
Kilgore Trout
Thanks for spoiling it for the rest of us. Now intellectual pursuits such as searching for a cure for cancer will be outlawed.
If people aren't even free to piss away their own money, do you really think we'll be free for much longer to get high on thoughts? Let me guess, thinking leads to harder drugs?
...StumbleUpon.
...Gathering... ...Gathering... gee that was really satisfying, I why?
ideopath @ play
To me, the most interesting bit in this article was the fact that the famous experiment with the rat and the pleasure lever connected to its brains WASN'T connected to the pleasure/reward center!
Though this "seeking" explanation to the non-orgasmic state of the subjects with that electrode in their brain is... more complicated, so it's not about to replace the old interpretation.
You can't take the sky from me...
A new study shows that people enjoy using the internet.
In other news a recent study has shown that 35% of scientific grant money goes on frivolous studies the results of which everybody already knew
Why couldnt they just have asked me on msn and saved themselves the time and money.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA BEOWULF CLUSTERS OF POSTERS TROLL SLASHDOT.
And yes, they run Linux, while BSD is still dying. Netcraft confirms it!
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
First reply!
Endorphins looping!
Burma Shave!
Yup, Netcraft confirms that 3 of the top 10 most reliable hosting sites use FreeBSD. 3 use Windows, 2 use Linux, and 2 use unknown ... so there is the possibility that 4 use Linux.
Btw, I love all three OS's, they're all great for different reasons.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
Our technologies are not inert and benign. They're not "just there". Using them affects us.
Answer me honestly -- after a couple decades of internet usage, what is your attention span like? When is the last time you read a long, hard, book?
Yes, the Web is useful. But there's a cost.
Was this web page written by evil crackers ? Why is my beloved Mac writing files called /Users/Downloads-1-1, Downloads-1-2 ??? This freaks me out, because I've been told there are NO VIRUSES FOR MAC !!!
Seriously, there is a fresh discussion in Apple forums, http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2113155&tstart=0&start=0.
This is a (sad thing) pow 2 : Mac vulnerabilities , coming from Slashdot
http://revj.sourceforge.net
Sometimes I wonder if the populations in developed countries are stable or falling because people in those countries easily find distraction from the biological imperatives that have driven people in the past.
The situation could be very similar to the situation with a certain Austrailian Jewel Beetle, which is in decline because the male of the species prefers discarded brown glass beer bottles to the shiny red female beetles. Could it be that modern life contains distractions equally effective at distracting humans from their biological imperitives ( not just sex )? Maybe all the stuff that seems 'environmentally unfriendly' to animals is equally 'environmentally unfriendly' to humans - even the stuff we crave - maybe especially the stuff we crave. There hasn't been heroin in nature - no crack - no television, not computers, no cheap easy grease fried food etc. What is neglected because these things satisfy our the biochemistry of our brains?
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