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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."
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.
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.
Check out the tab explosion at xkcd. It's straight to the point.
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