'Thirst for knowledge' may be opium craving

[archerships]

Neuroscientists have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix.

The "click" of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. He presents his theory in an invited article in the latest issue of American Scientist.

"While you're trying to understand a difficult theorem, it's not fun," said Biederman, professor of neuroscience in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

"But once you get it, you just feel fabulous."

The brain's craving for a fix motivates humans to maximize the rate at which they absorb knowledge, he said.

"I think we're exquisitely tuned to this as if we're junkies, second by second."

Biederman hypothesized that knowledge addiction has strong evolutionary value because mate selection correlates closely with perceived intelligence.

Only more pressing material needs, such as hunger, can suspend the quest for knowledge, he added.

The same mechanism is involved in the aesthetic experience, Biederman said, providing a neurological explanation for the pleasure we derive from art.

"This account may provide a plausible and very simple mechanism for aesthetic and perceptual and cognitive curiosity."

via eurekalert.org

Posted via web from crasch's posterous

Comments

[ilwitchgrrl.livejournal.com]

so learning stuff gets you high! awesome!

[istar.livejournal.com]

mate selection correlates closely with perceived intelligence

*chortle*

My half-assed non-scientistic guesstimate

[deeptape.livejournal.com]

My understand is that pretty much any positive feeling is a function of these and related "reward channels" in the brain. So we could say that eating is motivated by getting an opium fix, too.

But it is cool that we evolved a utilization of those mechanisms to reward the construction of mental models -- probably related to rewarding the situation where a prediction generated by the neocortex matches new input from the real world. That would be a handy building block for motivating search and validation of more complex mental models, which one could imagine being useful for learning territory layout, prey behavior, fruits that are good to eat, etc...