Dopamine and the Brain’s Hunger for Novelty
// October 30th, 2009 // BlackBerry
A really interesting post on Huffington by University of Texas neuroscientist Russell Poldrack throws a lot of light for me on the acitivity in the brain that drives so-called “addiction” to BlackBerrys and other PDAs.
Poldrack makes the point that dopamine is widely mis-conceived as a “feel-good” neurotransmitter when it is really a “gimme more” neurotransmitter. He cites some research involving rats are turned into slackers by blocking their dopamine.
Why should getting an email activate dopamine in the brain? My take-out from Poldrack’s post is that it’s about novelty. As he says himself, “from an evolutionary standpoint, we don’t want to spend all of our time and energy noticing the many things around us that don’t change from day to day.” There are also compelling evolutionary reasons for us being rewarded for finding new information; in the ancestral environment this might have identified a source of food or important gossip about someone in our social group.
So each time the BlackBerry flashes green or buzzes, we’re responding to the natural urge to see what’s new as it might be important. It invariably isn’t but that surge of dopamine can be very powerful…
In fact, Prof. Gloria Mark of UC Irvine once suggested to me that email is like the slot machines in Vegas – one checks and rechecks the Inbox in the hope of finding a recently arrived “good one” and getting a “high” as a result.
Hi Nathan. I find this whole area of “addiction” fascinating but don’t think the use of the word in the context of PDAs and email-checking is helpful. When successful business people start talking even tongue-in-cheek of being addicted, they are diminishing their own capacity to choose not to behave in this way. After all, as Jeffrey Schaler says – even of hard drugs – “Addiction is a Choice”