Our Brains are Wired for Seeking

I love this article on seeking from Slate magazine, I think it is one of those ideas that can help you gain a new perspective on human behavior (including your own). The article describes how the act of seeking is hardwired into our brains as an end to itself. The article then goes on to describe why this brain circuitry can be overactivated by Google, Blackberry and other common technologies

J.D Meier gives a great synopsis of the article in his post, Seeking is the Granddaddy of Emotional Systems. He boils the article down to five bullet points:

• You can’t stop doing it.   You have an insatiable need to search.  It’s stronger than the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep.  We’ll even seek at our own expense.
• Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems.   “Seeking” is the master emotional system that influences the rest of our emotional systems.
• Each stimulation evokes a reinvigorated search strategy.  It’s self-reinforcing.  Stimulating the lateral hypothalamus puts mammals in a loop of foraging, excitement, and craze.
• Seeking is the motivational engine that gets us out of bed.  “Seeking” is the natural drive that motivates us each day.
• Abstract rewards excite us as much as tangible one.  Our “Seeking” circuits are the ones firing when we get thrilled about the ideas or make intellectual connections.

The word seeking is overloaded with meaning, so it took me some thinking to parse out what the article means to me. I don’t think it means people are seekers in the sense of seeking philosophical enlightenment, or amazing impactful results, or even new meaningful knowledge. Some people are, but that’s not the norm.  The people who do amazing things have channeled their base-level seeking to achieve more powerful results, plus they have the innate capabilities that allow them to get those results. As a species we are seekers for tidbits, like mice searching for nuggets of food. The base level seeking impulse is very simple. Search for something that fulfills a simple need (food, shelter, comfort, etc). Its the searching for something that matters. The acquisition matters less and wears off quickly. Then we are off to seek again.

Its the happiness conundrum. You think you will be happy if you get X. Where X could be money, partner, knowledge, results, reputation, house, status, etc. But this is where we are tricked by our own biology. We are not meant to be happy or satisfied for extended periods of time. We are restless creatures and our biology gives us the happiness ‘high’ for a small amount of time and takes it away. We go back to seeking. If we were truly happy and satisfied we would stop seeking and evolutionarily that is a very bad thing.

We think happiness is good, therefore we seek it (its a meta-search if you will :)). But the search for happiness is endless and we will never truly reach the goal. So what are we to do? I think there are two choices, not necessarily mutually exclusive. While its cliche, I think we can choose to enjoy the journey - the seeking - as much as possible. If you consciously realize you are seeking and are ok with that, not fooled into thinking this search will end your constant seeking, then I think you can choose to enjoy it for what it is. The other choice is to try to make a conscious decision to be satisfied. I think satisfaction means you are happy with what you have and what you are. You can rest for a while and maybe stop seeking. Careful though - stay satisfied too long and you may become like the little creatures in H.G Well’s “The Time Machine” who have evolved into a state of feeble satisfaction due to having conquered all possible challenges in their environment.

Belief

Michael Michalko wrote an inspirational article on choice, how we can choose our attitudes deliberately and consciously.

I’ve been reflecting on the nature of belief lately. Belief in a God, or not. Belief in a caring Universe, or not. Belief in personal power to do good, or not. Belief in free will and the ability to change outcomes, or not.

It strikes me that many of these questions are unanswered and unanswerable. Nobody can prove to me that free will exists. Nobody can prove to me that there is a power in the universe that cares about my well being. Nobody can prove to me that consciousness is more than a set of electrical impulses in the mechanical system of my brain. Philosophy is the study of that which cannot be proven, we are unable to know truth in some areas, we have to cast about to find that which we believe in. Belief is a choice, is it not? And what you believe is the bedrock on which you form your attitudes and outlooks upon life. So if you have a choice, choose that which gives you the most happiness and allows you to be most effective in your life. Unexamined belief can lead to foolishness. Purposeful belief that improves effectiveness by shaping your lens on life can be very powerful. What do you want to accomplish and what beliefs would help you get there?

I saw a study in which people were given the choice to cheat or not in a simple game. The reward for cheating was a few extra dollars at the end of the game. The price of cheating depended on a personal belief system, on whether they could feel good about the choices they made. Before the game began, half of the people were given information that refuted the possibility of free will. Once they started playing, the people who had been told free will did not exist were much more likely to cheat. If they could not be responsible for their actions then why not make a little extra cash? This doesn’t prove anything about free will, and if you think about it you’ll understand why, but it illustrates how our beliefs and preconceptions influence our actions.

I choose to live in a universe in which I have free will, my actions matter, there is a loving force that cares about my well being and rewards that which is good (perhaps it's my wife :)). I believe I can make a lasting impact if I choose to.

Its worth asking yourself, what kind of a universe do you choose to live in?

Mind Control and the Friendly Mouse Part 2

Mind Control and the Friendly Mouse has been one of my most popular posts. I've gotten lots of comments and questions on this, one reader even going so far as to add a comment with a link to pictures of a mouse getting friendly with a cat!

It seems there is pent up curiosity regarding the incident. If you are interested to see what it looked like, check out the following pictures.


1. Mario, the cat, inspecting the friendly mouse. Notice the mouse showing no fear in his beady little eyes.


2. Mario sniffs the mouse to make sure it is what he thinks it is.
3. Mario is confused, this isn't how mice normally behave!


4. The mouse just before I threw him out into the field. He is so relaxed that he's nearly asleep.
My Related Posts

• Mind Control and the Friendly Mouse

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Red Meat

Mad Cow Disease may not be as bad as you think.

I feel confident that no one would relish the idea of a damaged brain; but I expect I harbor even more protective feelings toward my mind than most people. My livelihood is based on the capabilities and agilities of my brain. I think it is natural to want to protect that which you rely upon for your living. I imagine that surgeons must be similarly protective about their fine-motor skills and the health of their hands. I never ride my bike or go skiing without a helmet, I always wear a seatbelt, I sleep well and eat well – all in service to my grey-matter. Even the slightest loss of mental acuity leaves me worried that my career could be in jeopardy.

When I first heard of Mad Cow Disease it terrified me, it was my worst fear materialized. Here was a disease that would riddle my brain full of holes, progressively impairing my ability to think and reason. I wouldn’t know the cause of the fog that slowly enfolded me and would fight in futility hoping to somehow regain the sharpness that I had once enjoyed. Eventually it would overcome me, a complete loss of mental function leading to coma and death. This mental picture was made worse by my realization that the disease wasn’t caused by a living virus or bacteria, but rather a prion – a complex protein that is able to reproduce without the need for DNA or any other structure that we normally associate with organisms. This fact makes the disease impersonal, unlikely to be treatable at any point in the future, and hopelessly irreversible. I immediately stopped eating cow meat; I stopped eating burgers, steaks, sausage, beef chili, or anything else that contained cow parts. When I learned that gelatin was made of cow bones and skin I tried to avoid that too, but without much success – gelatin is in almost everything! I felt I was doing well to reduce my exposure and had limited my risk to a reasonable degree, whenever I heard about an infected cow in the US or Canada I felt justified in the steps I was taking. As far as I could tell Mad Cow Disease was highly contagious, and any exposure to the prions could result in my infection.

I suppose that giving up cow had put me on the moral high-ground, as described in a commentary I read in Newsweek. The article portrays the struggles of a Rabbi coming to terms with the implications of his carnivorous ways. If you value life, how can you wish death upon an animal in order to sustain yourself?

“Once animals talked just like people. Once every living creature ate only grass and nuts and a few berries when they could find them. No living thing ever thought about killing another living thing to eat it, until the day Noah wanted a hamburger.

One night Noah dreamed of a hamburger, and when he woke up, he wanted one really badly. But Noah wasn't exactly sure how to get a hamburger, so he asked his friend the cow, “I dreamed about a hamburger last night. Do you know where I can get one?”

The cow gave Noah a puzzled look and asked, “What's a hamburger?”

“I don't know exactly,” Noah replied. “All I know is that in my dream the hamburger was something delicious between two buns with lettuce, onions, pickles and some special sauce.”

“Have some more grass and forget about it,” said the cow.

Noah asked the snake, who was the smartest of all the animals, “What's a hamburger and how can I get one?”

The snake whispered in Noah's ear, “To get one you have to make one.”

“I don't know how to make one.” Noah sputtered.

The snake laughed, pointed at the cow who was peacefully munching some grass, and said to Noah, “To make a hamburger, you have to kill that cow, chop up her meat, and fry it in a pan--or flame broil it!”

Noah's mouth opened wide, “But...but...the cow is my friend! She is a living thing just like me! I can't kill her, chop up her meat and fry it in a pan! And what is flame broiling anyway?”

By now the snake was rolling around on the ground laughing, “Kid, if you want a hamburger, that's what you gotta do.”

Well...Noah really wanted a hamburger and so that's what he really did! The first hamburger tasted delicious. But when Noah came again to the fields everything was different. When he walked towards the birds, they flew away. When Noah went over to say hello to the cows and the sheep and the buffalo, they ran away from him. Even the fish swam away when they heard Noah coming.

Noah could not understand what had happened to his friends the animals, and he could not find one single animal that would explain it to him. In fact, since the day Noah ate the first hamburger, no animal has ever talked to a person. They are still too angry.

I’ve since learned that Mad Cow Disease may not be as bad as I had thought. It is likely that most people are resistant to the prions that cause the disease. This theory is borne out by the fact that exposure to infected meat has numbered in the millions yet the death toll in Europe is less than 200. Prion-based diseases, whether Mad Cow or some other variant, all have the same root cause – Cannibalism. Cows get Mad Cow by eating feed that contains cow brains and other parts. People, in the distant (and not so distant) past, have gotten brain wasting diseases by eating people brains and other parts. According to ScienceDaily, cannibalism over the eons produced evolutionary pressure that has resulted in human resistance to prions. If your ancestors practiced cannibalism then you are likely to have a resistance. The more cannibalism, the more resistance!

I choose to believe that my ancestors must have been highly cannibalistic, therefore I must have a very high resistance to Mad Cow Disease. So high, that I can eat cows at will and indulge in steaks, burgers and sausage to my heart’s delight. I’ve learned to stop worrying and once again love red meat.

Lessons learned:

• Mad Cow Disease is bad
• Cannibalism protects from Mad Cow Disease
• Most of our ancestors were happily eating each other before there were laws stating otherwise
• Cannibalistic ancestors are good!

Related Articles:

• If you’d like to read Rabbi Gelman’s article, you can find it here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12409517/site/newsweek/
• If you’d like to read the ScienceDaily article on Mad Cow resistance, you can find it here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/04/030411071024.htm

My Related Posts:

• Mind Control and the Friendly Mouse
• Don’t Focus on the Rocks

Mind Control and the Friendly Mouse

Half of the human population is infected with a mind altering parasite.

Last summer a curious incident occurred on my front porch between my cats and a friendly, portly mouse. It was strange enough that I spent some time puzzled by what I had seen. I was delighted to discover recently that what I had witnessed was nothing less than mind control exerted by a small parasite in the mouse’s brain that was trying to make passage from the mouse to my cats and ultimately into my own brain.

It was one of those summer days in which there were enough thunderstorm cells moving through our valley that the sky had been an unearthly purple color for hours. Between admiring the wind, the driving rain, and the exceptional shades of light and shadow I realize both of my cats were outside in the storm. My front porch is protected from the elements, and so that’s where I went to find them. Once outside I was surprised to see not two, but three pairs of eyes staring up at me. My cats had a visitor, a friend it seemed. He was a healthy looking field mouse with thick brown fur and a calm, almost sedate demeanor. If you’ve ever seen a mouse in the wild, or even in a pet store, you probably saw a lot of scurrying and nervous hiding. This mouse just sat next to my cats as if that was the most natural place in the world for him to be. Truth be told, I was a little disappointed and bit a put out. One of the primary reasons I’d bought the cats in the first place was to hunt mice and voles – they’d made a mess of my yard the year before. And yet, here were the cats with prey close at hand, docile prey at that, and there was no action. I asked my tomcat “Mario” to attack the mouse a couple of times but he showed no interest, not even when I picked him up and put him nose to nose with his adversary. The mouse didn’t even flinch, and Mario showed as much interest as if I’d been pointing him at a rock. In the end I picked up the mouse, wrapped in a rag to protect my fingers from sharp teeth, and I threw him out into the open field behind my house. I didn’t have the heart to do anything worse by him and I was starting to admire his pluck. The last memory I have of him is his stout little body, shaped like a brown, furry racquetball with legs sticking out, flying through the air.

I eventually chalked up the strange behavior to the storm, figuring that even predator and prey will make temporary peace in the face of a larger danger. It turns out that the answer may have been much more interesting. I recently read an article on LiveScience.com about a parasite called Toxoplasma that can control the behavior of rats in order to gain entry into a cat host. A rat infected with Taxoplasma will lose its natural fear of cats and is instead attracted to them. Like the mouse I saw, the infected rat will purposefully place its life in danger in ways that make it more likely to be eaten by a cat. The Taxoplasma parasite is surprisingly precise in its manipulation of the rodent mind. The only attribute it modifies is the fear of cats, in all other ways the rat appears normal.

Half the human population is infected with Toxoplasma. Anyone who has been in close proximity to a cat, especially if you’ve cleaned a litter box, is in danger of infection. The parasite will move to your brain and slowly change your personality. You will feel more anxiety, self doubt, and guilt. Worst case, you will develop schizophrenia – this is especially dangerous if your mother had Toxoplasma while she was pregnant. Beyond that, the impact on men and women diverge. Men are more likely to become anti-social, fight and get in car accidents. Reaction times slow, concern with personal appearances decrease and people will find you less attractive. Conversely, and quite unfairly I think, women get a more positive effect. They become more warm-hearted, keep up their appearances, connect with friends, and are found more attractive by others. Once infected, you cannot be cured and the parasite population grows inside your body over the years. The infection rates are not consistent from country to country. For instance, France and Germany have a nearly 90% infection rate while other countries have 20% or lower. This variation in infection rates has the surprising side effect of impacting national character and improving diversity!

Reflecting back on the mouse, who I imagine has a whole neighborhood full of cat friends at this point, has made me realize how fragile my ideas of personality are. My sense of me is a collection of memories and personality. I’ve long realized that memories can be destroyed by time, accident, or disease. However, I’ve always felt that my personality was what truly gave me my sense of self. It turns out personality is just as fragile as memory and can also be altered by time, accident, or disease.

Lessons Learned:

1. Don't trust mice
2. Don't trust cats - I've always suspected they secretly want to eat me for dinner
3. Men should never scoop the litter box!
   

You can find the LiveScience.com article here: http://www.livescience.com/scienceoffiction/060210_technovelgy.html

To learn more about Toxoplasma's effect on personality and national character, see the UK Times article "Dangerrrr: cats could alter your personality": http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1161270.ece

Yellowstone Doomsday

I have an unhealthy tendency to worry about doomsday scenarios. I don’t think I’m alone in this regard. When I used to live in Seattle I actually did research on volcanoes in the Cascade Range and picked a house that would be outside the path of danger if Mount Rainier decided to do its worst.

And by worst I do mean worst. Rainier is not a simple volcano that would blow its top like Mount St. Helens. It is an unstable mash of rotten rock, ice and magma barely holding itself together. Without enough structural rigidity to support a proper explosion it would instead send tons upon tons of mud, and debris down slope as it sloughed off its outer skin. In a worst case the flow would cover most of the lower Puget sound, perhaps even pushing into the sound itself, altering the coast line dramatically.

Bracketing my chosen home location on the other side is Glacier Peak, another volcano with the potential for eruption – in fact it is the second most active volcano in Washington right after Mount St. Helens. The point being, I chose my neighborhood not just for the normal reasons like the fact it was close to a pond, was an easy commute to work, and had nice walking paths but also because it was just outside the zones of potential destruction posed by these two scary mountains. Oh yeah and it was also far enough from the city center that a small nuke wouldn’t take out my home… but maybe that’s getting too paranoid!

When I moved to Montana I thought I could put aside my earlier concerns about a geological disaster, but it turns out I was quite mistaken. Right in my backyard, a mere 90 miles away, sits the Yellowstone caldera. That’s probably why I didn’t figure the danger potential out right away, I’m pretty savvy to volcanoes now, but calderas? It turns out a caldera is a fancy name for a really, really big volcano. A Super Volcano! I’d moved from the frying pan to the fire. This puppy, if it exploded would take out everything for 600 miles – or as one of my favorite authors once said, “We’d all turn into bright smudges of color”. When I look at the circle representing the extent of destruction I noticed something funny… Seattle is just outside the zone that would be completely destroyed by a massive Yellowstone eruption – I’d been looking at the wrong maps!

Well it turns out I needn’t have been so worried. The scientists at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (the same ones that put out a daily Volcanic-Alert Level for my area) have just released a study on the likelihood of a Yellowstone induced Armageddon. They’ve concluded that Yellowstone is not due for a large eruption anytime soon, and may not have enough power left in the ground for another large eruption ever. That’s a relief, because the last two major eruptions, if they happened now, would be civilization ending events.

If you are interested, you can read the report here - http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2007/1071/

I learned two other important pieces of information along the way:

1. My home insurance does cover volcanic eruptions
2. The “woodpecker signal” is not a secret Russian plot to prod Yellowstone into blowing its top. If you want to know more about this wacky fact, Google it yourself.

Don't Focus on the Rocks

Have you ever noticed that the things you spend the most time and energy on avoiding are the very things that trip you up the hardest? I think it’s a common trap that is excruciatingly difficult to see when you are inside it. The fear feeds on itself and you can be caught in a vicious cycle of making your problems real through the very act of fearing and avoiding them.

I learned this pattern of behavior when I learned how to whitewater kayak. As a beginner kayaker I was presented with a large assortment of obstacles in the form of rocks, currents, and eddies. I didn’t have enough experience to turn these individual pieces into a pattern that I could paddled through unscathed. There was no flow. Instead I had to deal with each obstacle only to be quickly presented with the next one in turn. I kept running into rocks, hitting currents wrong and, in general, doing exactly the opposite of what I should be doing if I wanted to stay in my boat, dry, and uninjured. The harder I tried the worse it got. After a lot of hard knocks, and some good advice from more experienced boaters, I learned a secret to success. Instead of focusing on the obstacles, focus on the space between. The river is more powerful than you are, go with the flow, focus on the areas that will provide safe passage, and stop focusing on the rocks! Amazingly, all it took to become a decent kayaker was a willingness to relax, trust the water, and stop focusing so hard on all the parts of the river I didn’t want to go.

Wow, talk about a revelation. Once I recognized the pattern I started seeing it everywhere. First in mountain biking and skiing – don’t focus on the trees! Then in life in general: relationships, career, family, flying, public speaking. Almost every area of my life was affected. I stopped worrying so much about risks and problems and instead I focused on positive outcomes.

I’ve started to build an innate feel for when I’m in the flow. Sometimes life feels easy and I can tell I’m in the flow. Other times life is hard and it feels like my struggles are just making it worse – I’m out of the flow. Just like on a river, the difference between easy sailing and a rocky struggle can be a couple of small decisions that place you in the right current. In life, just as in kayaking, it is critical to see the larger patterns and know what small moves will have a large positive impact. When I can’t figure that out I am consigned to struggling with each crisis one at a time, only to have the next one rear its ugly head.

I have some thoughts about what it takes to recognize and stay in the flow but I’ll save that for another post.