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Friday, March 14, 2008

You Are Powerless To Resist the Charms of Slog

posted by on March 14 at 8:35 AM

And science knows why.

Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans) … When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots …

[C]oming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’ “

So, yes, the Internet is in fact a drug of sorts, releasing happy hormones in your brain. Computer gaming, unsurprisingly, produces similar results. To keep civilization from surfing and gaming itself to death, clearly we must find ways to exploit our boredom aversion for productivity and profit.

Thankfully, we are at work on that as well. Consider, for example, the Peekaboom and ESP projects at Carnegie Mellon, which exploit
our desire for entertainment by getting us to perform otherwise tedious tasks - like labeling online images with words - as a side effect of playing games. (Full article on the subject here
by Luis Von Ahn, the MacArthur Fellow behind these projects.) Rest assured that researchers will be there to identify and save us from the destruction they have rained upon us.

RSS icon Comments

1

I am a junkie for boredom. The pile of paint cans sounds nice to me.

Posted by Fnarf | March 14, 2008 8:41 AM
2

I am addicted to the internet. And Fidelity.

Posted by Bellevue Ave | March 14, 2008 8:42 AM
3

Well, if that's the case, how come all the Flickr photos are of things like empty parking lots and old paint cans?

Posted by Fifty-Two-Eighty | March 14, 2008 8:46 AM
4

@1 please be sure to check out my posts later... they should be right up your alley.

Posted by infrequent | March 14, 2008 9:16 AM
5

This study is boring. Next topic.

Posted by Chris in Tampa | March 15, 2008 2:03 AM

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