The dangers of seeking

Its a brave new world out there now. And it has its own new dangers.

Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. Using google, iphone and twitter, we are constantly atwitter with newer and newer nuggets of mostly unusable information. "We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain" says Yoffe in this article" While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls. "

It's an interesting summary of research that seeks to understand the primal human hunger for information, mostly by extending our models of addiction. Why do we constantly check our email on Sunday morning, or refresh Facebook 100 times a day? What makes new facts so rewarding? For the brain, information is just another rewarding stimulus, an excitatory prompt that leads to the release of neurotransmitter. Apparently the juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused. Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank dopamine.

Here's Yoffe again “ Berridge has proposed that in some addictions the brain becomes sensitized to the wanting cycle of a particular reward. So addicts become obsessively driven to seek the reward, even as the reward itself becomes progressively less rewarding once obtained. "The dopamine system does not have satiety built into it," Berridge explains. "And under certain conditions it can lead us to irrational wants, excessive wants we'd be better off without." So we find ourselves letting one Google search lead to another, while often feeling the information is not vital and knowing we should stop. "As long as you sit there, the consumption renews the appetite," he explains. Actually all our electronic communication devices--e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter--are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities what the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting.

To me, and I suspect many readers, the quest for information can be an intensely rewarding experience. Discovering a previously elusive fact or soaking up a finely crafted argument can be as pleasurable as eating a fine meal when hungry or dousing a thirst with drink. This isn't just a fanciful analogy - a new study suggests that the same neurons that process the primitive physical rewards of food and water also signal the more abstract mental rewards of information.

Humans generally don't like being held in suspense when a big prize is on the horizon. If we get wind of a raise or a new job, we like to get advance information about what's in store. It turns out that monkeys feel the same way and like us, they find that information about a reward is rewarding in itself.

Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka trained two thirsty rhesus monkeys to choose between two targets on a screen with a flick of their eyes; in return, they randomly received either a large drink or a small one after a few seconds. Their choice of target didn't affect which drink they received, but it did affect whether they got prior information about the size of their reward. One target brought up another symbol that told them how much water they would get, while the other brought up a random symbol. After a few days of training, the monkeys almost always looked at the target that would give them advance intel, even though it never actually affected how much water they were given. They wanted knowledge for its own sake. What's more, even though the gap between picking a target and sipping some water was very small, the monkeys still wanted to know what was in store for them mere seconds later. To them, ignorance was far from bliss.

These experiments elegantly demonstrated an essential feature of the human mind, which is how evolution bootstrapped our penchant for ideas to the same reward circuits that govern our animal appetites. In other words, the political activist on hunger strike might still be relying on his reward circuity, even though he's actually denying himself caloric treats: the cause is simply more important than food. That's what makes ideas so powerful: No matter how esoteric or ethereal or abstract they get, they are ultimately plugged back into the same system that makes us want sex and sugar. The end result is that we can crave knowledge and facts just like a thirsty monkey craves water.

And doesn't this also help explain the allure of suspenseful narratives and a good detective novel? A good story, after all, is simply the artful denial of information - Will Elizabeth marry Darcy? Will Jason Bourne survive Moscow? - so that the audience craves resolution, which arrives in the form of information. The happy ending is a universal human reward.

And you always thought being able to search google was harmless. Well, think again !!