The 411 to avoid boredom
As 'infovores,' information is the fuel that keeps our brains all fired up.
Crackberry. Only a metaphor for our addiction-like urge to check e-mail? Or does the term shed light on a deep biological truth about our hunger for information?
Human-motivation studies traditionally stress well-established needs: food, water, sex, avoidance of pain. In a culture like ours, most of these needs can be satisfied easily. Just open the refrigerator door, or blow on that spoonful of hot soup. (Satisfying the need for sex may require a bit more doing.)
What's been missing from this scientific research is humans' nonstop need for more information.
We are "infovores." The human eye makes three fixations a second on the world around it, and not at random. Our gaze is drawn to items we suspect have something new to tell us -- posters, signs, windows, vistas, busy streets. Confined to a featureless physician's examination room, we desperately seek a magazine, lest we be reduced to counting the holes in the ceiling tiles. Cornered at a party in a banal conversation, we seek to freshen our drink.
Without new information to assimilate, we experience a highly unpleasant state. Boredom. Conversely, at one time or another, each of us has felt the joy of information-absorption -- the conversation that lasts late into the night, the awe at a magnificent vista.
Cognitive neuroscience -- the science that seeks to explain how mind emerges from brain -- is beginning to unravel how this all works. At USC, my students and I use brain scanning to specifically investigate the neuroscience behind the infovore phenomenon.
The explanation involves opioids, one of many neurotransmitters -- which are molecules that the neurons in our brain release to activate or inhibit other neighboring neurons. The effect of opioids is pleasurable. In fact, the same neural receptors are involved in the high we get from opiate drugs, such as heroin or morphine.
In the past, these opioids were believed to exist primarily in the spinal cord and lower brain centers, where they reduced the sensation of pain. But more recently, a gradient of opioid receptors was discovered in a region of the cerebral cortex, humans' enormous outer brain layer that is largely responsible for perception and cognition.
In the areas of the cortex that initially receive visual or auditory information, opioids are sparse. But in "association areas," where the sensory information triggers memory and taps into previous knowledge, there is a high density of opioid receptors. So the more a new piece of information tickles that part of your brain where you interpret the scene or conversation, the bigger the opioid hit.
