Why do we keep checking twitter, almost compulsively? Every refresh that brings a few more items gives us a little high. It's called "seeking", and turns out that rats in the scientists' labs are pretty much the same.
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.
There you go. If you didn't have actual work to do, you would keep hitting refresh on your twitter client until you collapsed. (It's true, isn't it?)
And, apparently, this little corner of the brain is not the pleasure center. The high that you get is not similar to the one you get after eating chocolate or after sex (or both). This is a different high, characterized not by euphoric satisfaction, but rather by excitement of finding something, and craving for more.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.
And the best part is this:
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.
Exactly. Describes you perfectly, doesn't it, my dear twitter/rss/email/sms addict?
Read the full article, if you're scientifically, or neuroscientifically inclined. I found this article via http://twitter.com/sandygautam, someone whose twitter and friendfeed stream you must follow (and refresh compulsively) if you liked this article.
Rightly said. We survive on the buzz. 😉 Or, at least pretend to! 😀
I stumbled onto your blog somehow, and have been reading the posts since an hour. I especially liked the posts about human psychology. my reading list will have more in the psychology section from now on 🙂