Dopamine And Digital: Our Constant Desire For New Information

Have you ever found yourself continuously looking up random information on the web? Or refreshing your inbox? Or checking for your friends’ statuses on Facebook? All this, knowing that you should be doing something more productive? This happens, as neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp explains, because we humans have a constant desire to seek (things, information) and that extends to both tangible objects and abstract ones. And powering our seeking system is a neurotransmitter in our brain called dopamine which raises our level of eagerness.

From Slate:

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.

Slate: “Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous”