Dream Jobs

In the movie ‘The Matrix’, super computers at the time had to run on batteries, and since human beings had more of a charge to them then your typical Ray o vac battery. So they farmed crops of humans who were kept alive by existing in a virtual world consisting of a nine to five grind in a cubicle and no stock options.  And so humans thrived in their real and virtual cocoons, and as the machines figured from hard experience, they would have it no other way. (except for those few who wanted a different reality, and live in a cave and eat pea soup for the rest of their lives. These folks were called neo-phytes).

Dream Jobs

What with green energy and fracking, humankind has got this energy thing down for the time being. Although the battery problem is solved, the reality one persists, and that’s when the Matrix reenters, and in a good way if you like cubicles that is.

According the most prognosticators on the subject, computing power is trending to infinity. This is particularly good for app creators, who with all that infinite power can model not just Duke Nukem, but the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke, and even lowly you. Called an ancestor simulation by the Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom, Bostrom has surmised that if one of your descendents, and I mean just one, decides to emulate you to see what life was like in the 21^st century, or perhaps get even with you for the mega trillions of national debt he has to pay back for your medicare, then very likely he can emulate just about everybody, and in every variation. In other words, if anybody in the future decides to run an ancestor simulation, then almost certainly YOU are living in the mind of a computer, and are a simulation! Even I cannot make this up, but ultimately I don’t need to if I am made up.

Well, back to my dream job………………….

Keys to your Facebook

If you want that dream job, dream date, or dream bank loan, it used to be that there was only a minimal amount of information you could cough up, and then you were sure it was carefully chosen to not reveal the embarrassing facts that if better known would send you packing or even packing off to jail. Presently, some employers are asking potential hires to hand over your password to your Facebook or other social media accounts so that your character, resume, personality, can be properly inspected. This controversy may be dampened by federal law, public outrage, or just saying no, but in the end it’s probably all moot, as your privacy has likely already escaped.  There is plenty of stuff out there to embarrass you, only you don’t know it yet.

But you will.

Right now, if I wanted the scoop on a competitor, a friend, or the next door neighbor, I would have to do a laborious internet search, and then laboriously make some sense out of it. Not anymore!  For the software tools we use from day to day, all that stuff can be brought to you automatically, whether you ask for it or not. Consider the common customer relationship management program.  The CRM we use at our own company, called Capsule, instantly goes out and grabs all the social networking connections of any individual whose email you type in.  So now you not only have their name but their ugly mug to look at, and instant access to their social networking connections that you never asked for in the first place. This is somewhat scary, for what this means that someone else who has that email can pull out all my social networking stuff and God knows whatever else is out there about my life. Of course, my life is as pristine as the driven winter snow (i.e. I am boring), but very likely yours is not. It used to be that only running for President would reveal your dirty laundry. Now your laundry is all over the place, so if I were you I’d watch your sox life among other things, or else create a fake facebook page!

See also:

The Onion reports that by 2040 every potential presidential candidate will be unelectable due  to Facebook.

Through a Google Glass Darkly

In a phrase, the internet revolution may be summed up as a global movement, inspired by IT overlords to move our intelligence to machines while decreasing our intelligence by encouraging us to do mindless things. In other words, the internet is dumbing us UP and dumbing us DOWN.

His and Hers Google Glasses

A case in point are a new software tool that will allow us to be omniscient in a robotic Terminator sort of way, and a new software app that will help terminate our intelligence.  The latest such boon to man or should I say peoplekind is called Google Glass, and brings Google two inches from your nose. The second, called Instagram, helps you make your pictures look old or otherwise crappy.  Jon Stewart on the Daily Show recently took note of this. His take on it is worth a billion virtual dollars!

Mr. Greenjeans and the Laptop Bunnies

For those of us who remember the past, or when we had teeth, to learn about the latest good stuff you had merely to turn on Captain Kangaroo in the morning.  Mr. Greenjeans was the family farmer who would daily bring warm and fuzzy creatures that we would want to adopt for some coin, an idea that was later replicated by the web app ‘Farmville’ and virtual  bunnies, which can be purchased for some coin.

              When bunnies were a ‘Best Buy’

Back then, you could feel and touch the bunnies close up before you made your buying decision, and the knowledgeable farmer was right there to answer any of your questions.  Of course, now we have smart phone apps that can read the bar code on the bunnies, and allow you to find an identical bunny at the factory farm for far less money and a better bunny warranty. Naturally, this puts the family farmer out of business, and leaves your progeny wondering what bunnies are actually like. However, at least we have bunny user reviews.     

                                                                        

Looking and feeling is a user experience that no amount of user reviews can replace.  When shopping moves to the web and our brick and mortar stores close, we are losing something priceless. Presently, pricing apps promote judgment by hearsay rather than experience. So, we will miss our experience with cuddly bunnies, laptops, wide screen displays, hard bound books, and much more of what used to be called a shopping experience. And our bunnies, like everything else, will live somewhere disembodied in the cloud. 

The Flow Experience: A Graphic Explanation

Flow Experience: Discovered by the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who defined it as flowing experience where the self reaches undreamed levels of consciousness and an evolved level of self-hood. It can also mean a high level of attentive arousal during touch and go situations (e.g. rock climbing, auto racing) where you'll likely lose your head along with your self and your consciousness if you don't pay attention.

Flow was coined by the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi[i] to describe the unique emotional state that parallels one’s complete ‘immersion’ in a task. As described by the psychologist Daniel Goleman, “Flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning.  In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.”[ii] These descriptions are of course metaphorical representations of the experience of flow, and describe what flow is like rather than what it is.  Because these ‘dependent’ measures of flow have no empirical referent (What is the neurological equivalent of spontaneous joy for instance?), one is left with the independent or antecedent variables of demand and skill that elicit flow, which thankfully can be empirically defined. What is unique about these variables is that they not only map to flow experiences, but also other emotional experiences such as anxiety and boredom. Thus Csikszentmihalyi's model does not just represent flow, but a wide range of emotional experiences. The question is, although emotion maps to demand and skill, can demand or skill be manipulated in the moment to elicit flow, or for that matter, any other emotion?

The Flow Channel

On the surface, the graphical representation of the flow channel is simple to understand. Just plot your moment to moment challenge against your moment to moment skill, and voila, you can predict what your emotions are going to be. For any particular task, the problem is that although demand moves up or down dependent upon the exigencies of the moment, skill should be relatively stable during or within the performance, and only change, and for the most part gradually between performances. Thus, one may accomplish a task that from moment to moment varies in demand, but the skills brought to that task are the same regardless of demand. What this means is that for any one performance set, skill is not a variable, but a constant. That is, one cannot adjust skill against demand during performance because skill can only change negligibly during performance, or in other words does not move. Thus for performance that requires any skill set, the only variable that can be manipulated is demand. For moment to moment behavior the adjustable variable that elicits flow is demand and demand alone. But that leaves us with figuring out what demand exactly is.

A demand may be defined as simple response-outcome contingency. Thus, if you do X, Y will occur or not occur. It is thus inferred that demand entails a fully predictable means-end relationship or expectancy. But the inference that the act-outcome expectancy is always fully predictable is not true. Although a response-outcome is fully predictable when skill overmatches demand, as demand rises to match and surpass skill, uncertainty in the prediction of a performance outcome also rises. At first, the uncertainty is positive, and reaches its highest level when a skill matches the level of demand. This represents a ‘touch and go’ experience wherein every move most likely will result in a positive outcome. It is here that many individuals report euphoric flow like states. Passing that, the moment to moment uncertainty of a bad outcome increases, along with a corresponding rise in tension and anxiety.

The Flow Channel

Momentary positive uncertainty as a logical function of the moment to moment variance occurring when demand matches skill has never been used as a predictor for flow, and is ignored in Csikszentmihalyi’s model because uncertainty by implication does not elicit affect. Rather, affect is imputed to metaphorical concepts of immersion, involvement, and focused attention that are not grounded to any specific neurological processes. However, the fact that act-outcome discrepancy alone has been correlated with specific neuro-chemical changes in the brain that map to euphoric, involved, timeless[iii], or immersive states, namely the activation of mid-brain dopamine systems, narrows the cause of flow to abstract elements of perception rather than metaphorical aspects of performance. These abstract perceptual elements denote information, and can easily be defined and reliably be mapped to behavior, and most importantly, corresponding affect.

A final perceptual aspect of demand that correlates with the elicitation of dopamine is the importance of the end result or goal of behavior. Specifically, dopaminergic systems are activated by the in tandem perception of discrepancy and the predicted utility or value of end result of a response contingency. The flow model maps behavior to demand and skill, but not only is skill fixed, so is the importance of the goal state that predicates demand. However, the relative importance of the goal state correlates with the intensity of affect. For example, representing an endeavor that matches his skills, a rock climber ascending a difficult cliff would be euphoric if the moment to moment end result was high, namely avoiding a fatal fall, but would be far less so if he was attached to a tether, and would suffer only an injury to his pride is he were to slip. Finally, the flow experience correlates also with a state of relaxation, which would also be predicted as choices in flow are singular and clear and involve no conflicting or stressful choices.  

The graphical model of the flow experience, like the Yerkes-Dodson model that predates it, is not an explanatory model because it does not derive from a neurologically grounded explanation of flow. Secondly, it is not even a very good descriptive model because it imputes a moment to moment variability in skill within a performance set that is not characteristic of any single performance, and because it ignores other correlations between moment to moment act-outcome discrepancy (or risk) and affect that are well demonstrated in neurological explanations of incentive motivation. Ultimately, the flow experience purports to explain a key facet of incentive motivation through an inductive approach that misrepresents the dependent (skill) and ignores the independent variables (discrepancy) that truly map to the affective and motivational experience that is flow, while ignoring the expansive neurological literature on incentive motivation.  In other words, as a creature of metaphor flow is good literature, but is not good science because it eschews the explanatory essence of science.

Journal Article On Bio-Behavioristic Theory of Flow

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[i] Barrett L. F., Russell J. (1998) Independence and bipolarity in the structure of current affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 967–984

[ii] Goleman, D. (2006) Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam

[iii] Meck, W. H. (1996) Neuropharmacology of timing and time perception, Cognitive Brain Research, (3)3-4, 227-242

The debate over dopamine's role in reward: the case for incentive salience and ANGELINA JOLIE!

(The article below by Dr. Kent Berridge on incentive motivation is one of the most important papers I have read on behavioral neuroscience. Nonetheless, when compared to other masters of motivational literature such as Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar, one feels it needs an extra 'something' to keep your attention on the printed word and of course remind you of the magic of dopamine as you navigate through prose that is admittedly not as exciting as the 4th grade level writing style of  our two masters.) 

The debate over dopamine’s role in reward: the case for incentive salience AND ANGELINA JOLIE!

Kent C. Berridge 

  

Received: 21 March 2006 /Accepted: 20 August 2006 / Published online: 27 October 2006

# Springer-Verlag 2006/ unauthorized Angelina Jolie revision 29 Feb 2012

Abstract

Introduction Debate continues over the precise causal contribution made by mesolimbic dopamine systems to reward. There are three competing explanatory categories: ‘liking’, learning, and ‘wanting’. Does dopamine mostly mediate the hedonic impact of reward (‘liking’)? Does it instead mediate learned predictions of future reward, prediction error teaching signals and stamp in associative links (learning)? Or does dopamine motivate the pursuit of rewards by attributing incentive salience to reward-related stimuli (‘wanting’)? Each hypothesis is evaluated here, and it is suggested that the incentive salience or ‘wanting’ hypothesis of dopamine function may be consistent with  more evidence than either learning or ‘liking’. In brief, recent evidence indicates that dopamine is neither necessary nor sufficient to mediate changes in hedonic ‘liking’ for sensory pleasures. Other recent evidence indicates that dopamine is not needed for new learning, and not sufficient to directly mediate learning by causing teaching or prediction signals. By contrast, growing evidence indicates that dopamine does contribute causally to incentive salience. Dopamine appears necessary for normal ‘wanting’, and dopamine activation can be sufficient to enhance cue-triggered incentive salience. Drugs of abuse that promote dopamine signals short circuit and sensitize dynamic mesolimbic mechanisms that evolved to attribute incentive salience to rewards. Such drugs interact with incentive salience integrations of Pavlovian associative information with physiological state signals. That interaction sets the stage to cause compulsive ‘wanting’ in addiction, but also provides opportunities for experiments to disentangle ‘wanting’, ‘liking’, and learning hypotheses. Results from studies that exploited those opportunities are described here.

Conclusion In short, dopamine’s contribution appears to be chiefly to cause ‘wanting’ for hedonic rewards, more than ‘liking’ or learning for those rewards.

Keywords Accumbens. Reward . Opioid . Dopamine, Basal forebrain . Aversion . Associative learning . Appetite Addiction, ANGELINA JOLIE!

Introduction

Some questions endure for ages, faced by generation after generation. Neuroscientists hope the question, ‘What does dopamine do for reward?’ will not be among them, but it still prompts debate after several decades. Fortunately, the answers to the dopamine question are becoming better. A formal debate on dopamine’s role in reward was held at a Gordon conference on catecholamines in 2005. This article describes the incentive salience case presented in that debate, and compares it to other hypotheses. A debate stance can sometimes help clarify alternative views, and that is the hope here. Therefore, this article is not an exhaustive review of dopamine function. My goal is to provide a useful viewpoint and a critical evaluation oalternatives and to point to new evidence that seems crucial to any decision about what dopamine does for reward.

Dopamine’s causal role in reward

What does dopamine do in reward? This is in essence a question about causation. It asks what causal contribution is made by increases or decreases in dopamine neurotransmission to produce changes in reward-related psychology and behavior. In this article, our focus is on cause and consequence. How to assign causal status to brain events is a complicated issue, but it is not too much an oversimplification to suggest that in practice, the causal question of dopamine’s role in reward has been approached in several experimental ways. One approach is to ask ‘What specific reward function is lost?’ when dopamine neurotransmission is suppressed (e.g., by antagonist drugs, neurotoxin, or other lesions or genetic manipulations that reduce dopamine neurotransmission). That approach asks about dopamine’s role as a necessary cause for reward. It identifies what reward functions cannot be carried on without it. A different approach is to ask ‘What reward function is enhanced?’ by elevations in dopamine signaling (e.g., elevated by agonist drugs, brain stimulation, or hyperdopaminergic genetic mutation). That approach asks about dopamine’s role as a sufficient cause for reward. It asks what reward function a dopamine increase is able to enhance (when other conditions in the brain do not simultaneously change so much as to invalidate hopes of obtaining a specific answer). A third approach is to ask ‘What reward functions are coded?’ by the dopamine neural activations during reward events (e.g., by recording firing of dopamine or related limbic neurons, measuring extracellular dopamine release, or neuroimaging activation in target structures). This question asks about neural coding of function via correlation, often in the hope of inferring causation on the basis of observing correlated functions. Dopamine function is a multifaceted target, so it helps to combine these multiple approaches. What does it contribute to reward? Let’s put on the table the best answers that have survived until today and evaluate each hypothesis for dopamine’s role against the others. These include activation-sensorimotor hypotheses of effort, arousal and response vigor; the hedonia hypothesis of reward pleasure; reward learning hypotheses of associative stamping-in, teaching signals and prediction errors; and the incentive salience hypothesis of reward ‘wanting’. I will describe each of these hypotheses in turn. Then recent experiments that pit hedonia, reward learning, and incentive salience hypothesis against each other will be considered. Their results indicates that dopamine may more directly mediate reward ‘wanting’ than either ‘liking’ or learning about the same rewards.

 Activation-sensorimotor hypothesis

Activation-sensorimotor hypotheses posit dopamine to mediate general functions of action generation, effort, movement, and general arousal or behavioral activation (Dommett et al. 2005; Horvitz 2002; Robbins and Everitt 1982; Salamone et al. 1994; Stricker and Zigmond 1986). These ideas are captured by statements in the literature such as “Dopamine mediates the ‘working to obtain’ (i.e., tendency to work for motivational stimulus and overcome response constraints, activation for engaging in vigorous  instrumental actions).” (Salamone and Correa 2002, p. 17) or “this dopamine response could assist in preparing the animal to deal with the unexpected by promoting the switching of attentional and behavioral resources” (Redgrave et al. 1999, p. 151) and “functions of the central DA systems could be explained in terms of an ‘energetic’ construct (i.e., one that accounts for the vigor and frequency of behavioral output) of activation.” (Robbins and Everitt 2006, this issue). Those sensorimotor hypotheses have much to recommend them and are supported by substantial evidence. Neuroscientists agree that dopamine systems play roles in movement activation and control and attention and arousal (Albin et al. 1995; Dauer and Przedborski 2003; Redgrave et al. 1999; Salamone and Correa 2002; Salamone et al. 2005). As an example from the 2005 Gordon debate, Salamone and colleagues have convincingly shown that low-dose neuroleptics shift choices away from effortful toward easy tasks, even at the cost of a preferred reward. However, activation-sensorimotor hypotheses are very general in scope, which makes it difficult for them to explain specific aspects of reward. They do not attempt to give clear and specific explanations of why rewards are hedonically pleasant or learned about or sought after. By extension to dopamine’s role in drug addiction and related disorders, they do not attempt to explain why addicts become compulsively motivated to take drugs again. To explain reward-specific aspects of dopamine activation and of addictive drugs, we need hypotheses of dopamine function that address more reward-specific processes themselves. In short, activation, effort or sensorimotor function does not explain why dopamine effects are rewarding, predictive or motivating—even though general activation function may be valid and important. For the rest of this paper, therefore, I will accept that dopamine does have general sensorimotor-activation functions, and will not challenge those hypotheses. But the discussion must move beyond them for the purpose of understanding dopamine’s more specific contributions to reward. We must turn to specific reward hypotheses of what dopamine does.

Analysis of hedonia hypothesis

The hedonia hypothesis suggests that dopamine in nucleus accumbens essentially is a ‘pleasure neurotransmitter’. It was developed chiefly by Roy Wise and his colleagues in the 1970s and 1980s and became a very influential view. As Wise originally put it: “the dopamine junctions represent a synaptic way station...where sensory inputs are translated into the hedonic messages we experience as pleasure, euphoria or ‘yumminess’” (Wise 1980, p. 94). Continuing echoes of the hedonia hypothesis might perhaps still be heard in more recent neuroscience statements such as “Clearly, the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system is critical for psychostimulant activation and psychomotor stimulant reinforcement and plays a role in the reinforcing action of other drugs” (Koob and Le Moal 2006, p. 89) or “The ability of drugs of abuse to increase dopamine in nucleus accumbens underlies their reinforcing effects.” ............................

Well, you get the drift. For the real article, sadly without Angelina, go here.

Searching for Red Stockings: The Myth of Information Overload

As the internet advocate Clay Shirky noted, everybody who talks about information overload starts with the graph with the telltale ascending line and the litany of the troubles it entails. As the line informs us, information is increasing exponentially, and we can barely deal with it intellectually and emotionally, or more and more often, we can’t. And the solution?  It is here that the rallying cries diverge. 

Scary Graph  (from Basex.com)

On one side there is Shirky, who assigns the problem to filter failure, and why not? It’s a reasonable thing after all to suppose that if we had better ways to sort out information, we could cull the bad from the good, and be able to significantly reduce the information we have to cope with daily.  Search, social media, and e-commerce firms of course concur, and are rapidly improving their search algorithms (using of course information about you that you voluntarily or involuntarily port over to them) so  you can find what you need the first time.

On the other hand is the internet critic Nicolas Carr, who attributes information overload to filter success. In Carr’s opinion our filters are working all too well, and the problem is that they are getting better and better. 

Thus,

“….The real source of information overload…. is the stuff we like, the stuff we want. And as filters get better, that's exactly the stuff we get more of.

It's a mistake, in short, to assume that as filters improve they have the effect of reducing the information we have to look at. As today's filters improve, they expand the information we feel compelled to take notice of. Yes, they winnow out the uninteresting stuff (imperfectly), but they deliver a vastly greater supply of interesting stuff. And precisely because the information is of interest to us, we feel pressure to attend to it. As a result, our sense of overload increases.”

Implicit in both arguments is this premise:

The information we want is the same as the information we need.

This is an argument for the curing salve of better filters (to fine tune what we want, since our wants are finite) or a call for mass despair (because our wants are infinite, and thus overwhelm us when they are invariably served by the web). This premise derives from an assumption that in our hubris we are wont to make: that humans are rational agents who know what they want and why.

But what if this was not true?  What if we are at root irrational creatures who delude ourselves into thinking that we know what we want and why we want it? What if the information we want is more often than not different from the information we need? If this is true, then to paraphrase Shakespeare, our fate is not in the stars (or rather the cloud), but in ourselves, because if the information that we want is often not the same as the information we need, then we need to be aware of how to distinguish our wants from our needs and how and when  to constrain the former.  In other words, for information overload, the key is to understand how our basic motivations work.

The question that Shirky and Carr beg is thus elemental: Why is information of interest to us, because it is important, or because of something else?  To answer this question, let us illustrate how a basic search was performed over the last few generations by going to our metaphorical sock drawer in search of red stockings.

It’s 1912, and you as t-shirt manufacturer want to begin a production run of commemorative t-shirts of the Boston Red Stockings triumph in the World Series. As soon as the game is over you receive an immediate telegraph of their victory, and it’s off to the races to start production.

It’s 1932, and you as a t- shirt manufacturer want to get started with your commemorative t-shirt run, and so you listen to the game on the radio, and upon its completion, get to work.

It’s 2012, and you as a t-shirt manufacturer want get to cracking on your production run celebrating the Boston Red Sox victory, and you follow the sox from college draft to preseason to all of their games through the World Series, and monitor all the social and news media who have something to say about it.

In all three time frames, the decision point happens in a second at a predetermined moment, namely when (hopefully) the sox win. The narrative of how that final fact (a sox victory in the final game) got there is irrelevant. No matter what era, the decision point is concise, precise, and momentary, and gets to you on time regardless of the media you use and irrespective of its background story.  There is no need to follow the narrative that describes the changing facts that get us to that point, as the point of the last man flying out in the last inning is all we need.

The difference between the three eras is that in the first era we could not follow the narrative that follows the sox on their way to the pennant, but in the latter era we could, thanks to the rapidly declining transaction cost for information that allows us to perceive the changing flow or narrative of information. But following the latter comes at a cost.  By following the progress of the sox we become diverted from other things of value, and suffer regret.  If these diversions are small scale and populate our working day, they become distractions and cause us to lose focus and attention. Finally, as we continually choose between distraction and staying on course, we become tense and nervous.

The metaphor of ‘information overload’ would seem to apply here, as every frame of every moment of the continuous narrative leading to the Red Sox pennant can and is considered by the sox fan. However, like a strip of static frames in a motion picture that give rise to a sense of movement or motion, the story is interesting because of the novel ways the narrative changes, and it is the changes that compel. Thus, although the ending is necessary for us to go about our business, the story that leads to it is compelling not because of what it is, but how it is continually transformed.

We can expand our simple Red Sox narrative to the narratives embedded in all the things we do that are being progressively revealed by the web. We need to know facts, but what obsesses us is the narrative or story that brings us to those facts.  The internet produces not just more information, but more changing patterns of information. We see not a picture, but a movie, not a note, but a score, not a phrase but a speech. Moreover, we conflate the importance of the narrative with the significance of its conclusion, or what we want with what we need. This is a dangerous delusion, for the stuff we want depends upon the narrative or facts in motion, but the stuff we need depends upon the facts sitting still.

We can get the facts we daily need in a half hour, but continually accessing the web to see a moving stock market, an evolving middle east crisis, or what Uncle Charlie is up to are never ending stories that excite us, engage us, but ultimately bring us down. A narrative is of course still important if our behavior necessarily changes in tandem. In this case the narrative is ‘feedback’. Thus, a quarterback’s performance is determined by feedback during the moment to moment course of the game. However, for the stadium audience, this feedback is entertainment, and for those who attend to the ever expanding narrative on the game itself, an unnecessary and harmful obsession.

The Myth of Information Overload

As a metaphor, information overload attributes the psychological effects of the internet to what information is rather than how it is arranged, and ultimately the metaphor of information overload in inadequate because we are not overloaded with information but with ever evolving novel patterns of information or narratives. Because humans are above all novelty-seeking creatures, novelty is enhanced not in the facts but in the stories they tell. Our interest  lies not only in the rational but in the abstract properties of information. So it is not information that overloads, but elemental aspects of information, namely novelty that when produced in infinite abundance by the web leads us to endless distraction, stress, and regret.  Because the explanation for how the web influences us psychologically is based on core assumptions on human motivation that are faulty, namely that we are rational actors, we proceed with our daily lives under a dangerous illusion abetted unfortunately by the perverse incentives of our media providers to keep us hanging onto the story when the conclusion is all we need. Whether or not we can escape this illusion and its dire consequences depends ultimately on not just a better story, but also a better explanation as to how our minds actually work.

Sources:

Finding a better story to describe the emerging fact that wanting and liking aren’t the same thing takes you to the seminal work performed by the neuropsychologist Kent Berridge on the topic, or my own narrative on Berridge’s work and what it means.  Hopefully both make for some interesting explanations.

Feedback Overload

Since the invention of writing, the written word has literally piled up. Indeed, from very early on, mankind has been overloaded with information. However, the problem posed by of information overload is not in a metaphorical stack of stuff, but in our relative inability of finding the needle of information we need in the haystack of information we don’t. Things like the Dewey decimal system, book indexes, and a helpful librarian barely addressed the problem until the invention of the internet search engine allows us to find our need, or in this case, needles. As the pundit Nicolas Carr opined[i], the problem we confront today is not finding a needle in an infinite informational haystack, but finding an infinite stack of needles that all merit consideration. Nowadays, when we electronically search for any topic, we are provided with many similar bits of information that allow us to more precisely fine tune or correct the deficiencies of knowledge. This error correction or feedback function represents a progressive resolution of the discrepancies between what we do and don’t know. Feedback may represent unexpected changes in our progress to a goal and/or unexpected changes in our knowledge of the nature of a goal. Feedback of course is essential to learning, but consequential to that learning is the increased activity of midbrain dopamine neurons, and it is the neuro-modulator dopamine that enables the consolidation of memory as well as heightened alertness and attention on the task at hand. But dopamine also increases positive affect that adds momentary value or ‘incentive salience’ to behavior, but does not intrinsically predict the overall or long term goodness or utility of behavior. Put a bit differently by the neuro-psychologist Kent Berridge, “The brain results suggest that pure decision utility—and not predicted utility—is raised by activating mesolimbic dopamine systems[ii].”  What this means is that the importance of the decision in the moment, or its ‘decision utility’ does not influence its long term or ‘predicted utility’. The implications of this are profound, for as the marginal utility of examining each informative ‘needle’ declines, the successive needles of information remain novel, and we continue to dwell on nearly redundant links of information not because they are useful but because they are new. In other words, whereas in the past impoverished feedback environments caused us to waste much time looking for information, the rich feedback environments heralded by improvements in web search lead us to waste much time looking at information! This means that we will be affectively and not rationally inclined to overstay our welcome on sites that not only provide us what we want and need, but infinite variations of the same information that we ‘want’ but don’t need. The problem thus is not information overload, but ‘feedback overload’, as the ever increasing amount and granularity of information feedback provides greater and greater detail that can increase the short term or moment to moment value of behavior to the detriment of our long term interests.

Information Search, CA 1960

Information Search, CA 2011

This increase in the momentary incentive salience of behavior can be used to conform with (if not predict) practical ends, but its ultimate value depends upon whose practical ends.  For example, the ‘Khan Academy’ (khanacademy.org) is an online math tutorial that uses rich feedback embodied in badges, scores, hints, etc. to increase the decision utility of performing math exercises in service of the predicted utility of long term mastery of say, the mathematical calculus. On the other hand, a Google search also provides rich feedback including social network feeds, instant messaging, videos, helpful links, and now badges in the service of the predicted utility of Google, namely advertising. 

Ultimately, the problem is not that we are lost in a haystack, but that we are proverbially resting on a bed of pins and needles with each pin needlessly diverting our attention. The notion of ‘feedback overload’ means we are neurologically inclined to overvalue the short term importance or salience of new information, and when new information scales in amount and availability, we begin to live for a moment that may not conform to our ultimate good. For the rich feedback mechanisms provided by the internet, whether it is social media of just plain search, the solution to this problem is not better filtering of information or better feedback (as this merely acerbates the problem), but less, and can only be accomplished by constraining what information you can see, or when you can see it. The simple solution is keeping your personal library and newspaper, and severely restricting your time with search tools (the internet) that work too well. As internet feedback trends to infinity in ever morphing detail and availability, this will be our only option to spare us a new dark age caused by being blinded by the light.


For much more on feedback overload, take a look at my new e-book on the psychology of the internet:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/69880622/One-Track-Minds-The-Surprising-Psychology-of-the-Internet

References:

Berridge, K. and Aldridge, J. W. Decision utility, the brain, and the pursuit of hedonic Goals, Social Cognition, Vol. 26, No. 5, 2008, pp. 621–646

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~berridge/

Nicolas Carr, Roughtype (blog)

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/03/situational_ove.php

Lifehacking

A distractive world does lots of bad things to our motivation, our intelligence, and our happiness. But even though we can’t fathom the disease, each of its symptoms has a fathomable cure. So you tinker around the edges of our real problems, and come up with nifty procedures that like a set of wrenches in a tool box can be pulled out to solve any problem. This finds its most awful representation in the helpful hints articles that plague our discourse on human motivation. Indeed, a cottage industry has popped up to take the little and consistent correlations of life and package them into the equivalent of a set of Philips screwdrivers.  So rather than understand the system, we are content merely with hacking into the system, and making a fix is good enough even though it is not nearly enough.  The problem with screwdrivers though is that you have to try quite a few before they fit, which leaves you fiddling about the tool box since you have no idea of how to explain your carpentry problem, which would of course narrow the choice of screwdrivers to one.

Now expand this metaphor to human motivation, and you come up with the popular concept of ‘lifehacking’.  Originally pertaining to short cuts computer programmers would use to be more productive, the same phrase has expanded to any sort of trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method to increase productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life. Or, in other words, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack[i].  The problem though is that shorn of explanation, life hacking becomes itself a source of distraction. Ironically, it was the blogger Merlin Mann, an early adopter of lifehacking, who recognized this.

One of the weaknesses of lifehacking as a weapon in the war against distraction, Mann admits, is that it tends to become extremely distracting. You can spend solid days reading reviews of filing techniques and organizational software. “On the web, there’s a certain kind of encouragement to never ask yourself how much information you really need,” he says. “But when I get to the point where I’m seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap, or what kind of notebook to buy, I’m so far off the idea of lifehacks that it’s indistinguishable from where we started. There are a lot of people out there that find this a very sticky idea, and there’s very little advice right now to tell them that the only thing to do is action, and everything else is horseshit. My wife reminds me sometimes: ‘You have all the information you need to do something right now.’  or Mann, many of our attention problems are symptoms of larger existential issues: motivation, happiness, neurochemistry. “I’m not a physician or a psychiatrist, but I’ll tell you, I think a lot of it is some form of untreated ADHD or depression,” he says. “Your mind is not getting the dopamine or the hugs that it needs to keep you focused on what you’re doing. And any time your work gets a little bit too hard or a little bit too boring, you allow it to catch on to something that’s more interesting to you.” (Mann himself started getting treated for ADD a year ago; he says it’s helped his focus quite a lot. Mann’s advice can shade, occasionally, into Buddhist territory. “There’s no shell script, there’s no fancy pen, there’s no notebook or nap or Firefox extension or hack that’s gonna help you figure out why the fuck you’re here,” he tells me. “That’s on you. This makes me sound like one of those people who swindled the Beatles, but if you are having attention problems, the best way to deal with it is by admitting it and then saying, ‘From now on, I’m gonna be in the moment and more cognizant.’ I said not long ago, I think on Twitter—God, I quote myself a lot, what an asshole—that really all there is to self-help is  Buddhism with a service mark.)[ii]

In my opinion, Mann is right on mark. Conforming to and far antedating our recommendations, Buddhist practices require not changes in the various styles of living, but a global change in life style. Like prayer in the western world, Buddhist mindfulness and meditative procedures require more than a little faith but are not dependent upon religious faith, yet for those who are beset by distractions; they are an answer to their prayers.  As we have seen, science would tend to agree, but the science of distraction must necessarily emerge from an explanation of motivation, and it is explanation that compels.

Above is an excerpt from my new e-book on the psychology of the internet:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/69880622/One-Track-Minds-The-Surprising-Psychology-of-the-Interne

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[i] Lifehack, Wikipedia.

[ii] Anderson, S. (2009) New York Magazine, In defense of distraction