On "Seeking"

"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