[LINK] Seeking

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

Seeking
How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And 
why that's dangerous.
By Emily Yoffe
Slate
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009, at 5:40 PM ET
_http://www.slate.com/id/2224932/_

Seeking. You can't stop doing it. 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. We are so insatiably curious 
that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are 
becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore 
judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for 
information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in 
Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep 
whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when 
we're out to dinner." We reach the point that we wonder about our 
sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so 
obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that 
she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."

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. 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.

In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a 
laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned. They would 
stick an electrode in a rat's brain and, whenever the rat went to a 
particular corner of its cage, would give it a small shock and note the 
reaction. One day they unknowingly inserted the probe in the wrong 
place, and when Olds tested the rat, it kept returning over and over to 
the corner where it received the shock. He eventually discovered that if 
the probe was put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were 
allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would 
press until they collapsed.

Olds, and everyone else, assumed he'd found the brain's pleasure center 
(some scientists still think so). Later experiments done on humans 
confirmed that people will neglect almost everything—their personal 
hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz.

But to Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, this 
supposed pleasure center didn't look very much like it was producing 
pleasure. Those self-stimulating rats, and later those humans, did not 
exhibit the euphoric satisfaction of creatures eating Double Stuf Oreos 
or repeatedly having orgasms. The animals, he writes in Affective 
Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, were 
"excessively excited, even crazed." The rats were in a constant state of 
sniffing and foraging. Some of the human subjects described feeling 
sexually aroused but didn't experience climax. Mammals stimulating the 
lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, 
"where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy" (and 
Panksepp wasn't referring to Bing).

It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, 
interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally 
settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional 
systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, 
"Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems." It is the mammalian 
motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or 
hole to venture forth into the world. It's why, as animal scientist 
Temple Grandin writes in Animals Make Us Human, experiments show that 
animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than 
to have it delivered to them.

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 juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter 
dopamine. 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.

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. Our 
internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine 
system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine 
in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the 
problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article 
by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic last year, "Is Google Making Us 
Stupid?" speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling 
our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained 
attention to a long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting 
"enter" to get our next fix.

University of Michigan professor of psychology Kent Berridge has spent 
more than two decades figuring out how the brain experiences pleasure. 
Like Panksepp, he, too, has come to the conclusion that what James Olds' 
rats were stimulating was not their reward center. In a series of 
experiments, he and other researchers have been able to tease apart that 
the mammalian brain has separate systems for what Berridge calls wanting 
and liking.

Wanting is Berridge's equivalent for Panksepp's seeking system. It is 
the liking system that Berridge believes is the brain's reward center. 
When we experience pleasure, it is our own opioid system, rather than 
our dopamine system, that is being stimulated. This is why the opiate 
drugs induce a kind of blissful stupor so different from the animating 
effect of cocaine and amphetamines. Wanting and liking are 
complementary. The former catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us 
to a satisfied pause. Seeking needs to be turned off, if even for a 
little while, so that the system does not run in an endless loop. When 
we get the object of our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), 
we engage in consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the 
brain and temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.

But our brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. 
"The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for 
desire," Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures 
that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, 
are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an 
unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University 
neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and 
looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has 
consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the 
possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one.

Just how powerful (and separate) wanting is from liking is illustrated 
in animal experiments. Berridge writes that studies have shown that rats 
whose dopamine neurons have been destroyed retain the ability to walk, 
chew, and swallow but will starve to death even if food is right under 
their noses because they have lost the will to go get it. Conversely, 
Berridge discovered that rats with a mutation that floods their brains 
with dopamine learned more quickly than normal rats how to negotiate a 
runway to reach the food. But once they got it, they didn't find the 
food more pleasurable than the nonenhanced rats. (No, the rats didn't 
provide a Zagat rating; scientists measure rats' facial reactions to food.)

That study has implications for drug addiction and other compulsive 
behaviors. 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 the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. 
Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by 
finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If 
the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even 
more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."

The system is also activated by particular types of cues that a reward 
is coming. In order to have the maximum effect, the cues should be 
small, discrete, specific—like the bell Pavlov rang for his dogs. 
Panksepp says a way to drive animals into a frenzy is to give them only 
tiny bits of food: This simultaneously stimulating and unsatisfying 
tease sends the seeking system into hyperactivity. Berridge says the 
"ding" announcing a new e-mail or the vibration that signals the arrival 
of a text message serves as a reward cue for us. And when we respond, we 
get a little piece of news (Twitter, anyone?), making us want more. 
These information nuggets may be as uniquely potent for humans as a 
Froot Loop to a rat. When you give a rat a minuscule dose of sugar, it 
engenders "a panting appetite," Berridge says—a powerful and not 
necessarily pleasant state.

If humans are seeking machines, we've now created the perfect machines 
to allow us to seek endlessly. This perhaps should make us cautious. In 
Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin writes of driving two indoor cats 
crazy by flicking a laser pointer around the room. They wouldn't stop 
stalking and pouncing on this ungraspable dot of light—their dopamine 
system pumping. She writes that no wild cat would indulge in such 
useless behavior: "A cat wants to catch the mouse, not chase it in 
circles forever." She says "mindless chasing" makes an animal less 
likely to meet its real needs "because it short-circuits intelligent 
stalking behavior." As we chase after flickering bits of information, 
it's a salutary warning.

-- 
 
Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au