Tropophilia

In Tropophilia’s first guest post, Dan wrote about information saturation in our increasingly connected world:

Will we ever reach a point in which our desire for information, for advances in technology, science, medicine, etc. is quenched, where the demand weakens, and the bubble bursts? It seems that an ever-increasing demand for knowledge has fueled, since the beginning of time, most of our scientific and technological advances. And at the beginning, our needs necessitated these advances. But have we, or will we ever reach a point when our daily lives have no direct needs that can’t be satisfied by previously existing knowledge? What do we need to know now, that we didn’t know before, to help us be better humans or citizens?

Interesting questions indeed, and it seems that Dan hasn’t been the only one posing them.  In his “Portals” column for the Wall Street Journal, Lee Gomes wrote last week about how human beings are more or less “wired” to consume endless amounts of information.

Gomes cites a study where researchers found “increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids” when test subjects were shown certain images.  Those images were determined to contain more processable information than others, and so a correlation arose between the consumption of information and pleasure experienced by the brain.  As lead researcher Dr. Irving Biederman put it:

When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’

So it appears we crave information just like we crave food.  But as Dan asked, doesn’t basic economic theory tell us that “every market can reach a point in which demand is decreased due to abundant availability”?  Why doesn’t our demand for information decrease as the scarcity of information decreases?

Back to Gomes:

For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other.  Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.  [...]  Technology is playing a trick on us. We are programmed for scarcity and can’t dial back when something is abundant.  The same happens with food: Because at one time we never knew when the next saber-toothed tiger might come along for food, it made sense to pack on the calories whenever we chanced upon them. That’s not much help in today’s world of snack aisles and super sizes.

And so it is, he suggests, that we are hard-wired for information.  Despite years of evolution in both body and mind, human beings are still hunter-gatherers fighting for self-preservation in the State of Nature.  Just as our bodies are sponges for calories, so our brains hunger for endless amounts of information.  We never know (or so our brains think) when we’ll need to call upon that one fact to get us that promotion or to win that debate, just like we don’t know (or so our bodies think) when our next meal might be.

Under this theory, technology is to the brain as fast food is to the body: giving us what we crave in the shortest amount of time and with the least amount of effort.  Luckily, with a conscious effort one can still get the speed without getting the unhealthiness.  Reading a book for an hour instead of playing on Facebook just might be the equivalent to choosing salad over fries.

Hard wired for information or just addicted to it, it’s important to remember what Aristotle (who lived considerably closer to that hunter-gatherer age than we do) preached as one of the keys to happiness: moderation in all things.

Image courtesy of Level Ten.