"Seeking" was the article that Melissa chose to share with our class for her Choice Essay presentation. I read it last night and was absolutely taken away by it.
The article basically told about how our brains get a great deal of pleasure by searching or hunting for things. In fact, they receive more pleasure from the chase for something than actually getting it. This explained to me so many things in life in so many different areas. This explains a lot about love and sensual excitement learning, eating, and all sorts of things.
I love to learn and I figured out why it's so rewarding for me: it's an ongoing search and there is no final goal or ending point at which I am let down some by the final high. Dopamine is the stimulant that gets one excited in the chase, while opiates are what is released when the reward is reached. Dopamine is a stimulating high and opiates are a relaxing high. So basically, when I'm learning it's like having a high without ever having the let down. The same part of the brain is stimulated by sexual excitement. I won't go into the physiology of sex too far, you can read that on your own...but if you think about it, sex brain chemistry can relate to lots of things in life.
I found myself relating to the article at every point: personal experiences were ubiquitously connected. In fact, I was connecting what I was doing at the time with the article. While reading the article, I was multitasking by reading, Facebooking, and chatting. The article spoke about conditioning and Pavlov's dog and how people become excited when they get a new message, or their phone rings. I got a sense of expectation everytime my Skype account dinged that I had a new instant message from someone or everytime the little red box of Facebook notifications popped up. It's clear that Facebooking has become a source of dopamine for me. That's probably not a good thing either. When I get bored with doing homework I go on Facebook or Youtube, even if I know there's nothing to see.
The fact that seeking for information online is becoming like a drug addiction is well-founded. We must be careful about how much we are googling or twittering, etc. I don't think that these things are as dangerous as the author says, but we must exercise discretion in how we use them. Searching for information is a good thing; it's just important that we do it at the right time in the right way.
External links: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Nicholas Carr
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Andrew- I also wrote about melissa's article! I really enjoyed this especially after taking AP psych last year. It was all just verifying everything I already learned. I agree that people are getting addicted to Facebook notifications, etc. However, I disagree with your Twittering statement. I used to have a Twitter account and became so into updating it from my phone that I actually had to delete it! I still wish I had an account, but it was consuming my life (definitely not a healthy thing!)
ReplyDeleteI blown away as well when i read the article!! That's why I picked it :)
ReplyDeleteI like how you connected your personal experience of loving to learn to this article...that's exactly what I did too!!
I'm sure you'll have a lot of interesting things to say in the discussion tomorrow, can't wait :)
It's hearing things like this that make me wish I had taken AP Psych this year. The comments on the natural high were very well explained, and I agree with all of them. I'm not quite sure if it's quite the same thing with a computer addiction, though I'm sure it still has something to do with brain chemicals.
ReplyDeleteI can tell from reading your and Chelsea's blogs about this article that I would have enjoyed reading it. I absolutely LOVED AP Psychology, and Pavlov's classical conditioning was definitely MY unit (ask Chelsea! I rocked the learning unit).
ReplyDeleteAlso, I can totally relate to loving learning new things, to getting excited over phone calls and new Facebook notifications, and to browsing around Youtube in search of something I'm not even sure of. It's insane in more than one sense of the word.