Thursday, August 13, 2009

Slate article on the neural distinction between wanting and liking

This recent article in Slate seems damn appropriate for all ye nerds reading Infinite Jest this summer.

Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous. By Emily Yoffe

Juicy excerpts:

[Olds] eventually discovered that if the probe was put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they collapsed.

Olds, and everyone else, assumed he'd found the brain's pleasure center (some scientists still think so). Later experiments done on humans confirmed that people will neglect almost everything—their personal hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz.

But to Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, this supposed pleasure center didn't look very much like it was producing pleasure. Those self-stimulating rats, and later those humans, did not exhibit the euphoric satisfaction of creatures eating Double Stuf Oreos or repeatedly having orgasms. The animals, he writes in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, were "excessively excited, even crazed." The rats were in a constant state of sniffing and foraging. Some of the human subjects described feeling sexually aroused but didn't experience climax. Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, "where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy" (and Panksepp wasn't referring to Bing).

[...]

University of Michigan professor of psychology Kent Berridge has spent more than two decades figuring out how the brain experiences pleasure. Like Panksepp, he, too, has come to the conclusion that what James Olds' rats were stimulating was not their reward center. In a series of experiments, he and other researchers have been able to tease apart that the mammalian brain has separate systems for what Berridge calls wanting and liking.

Wanting is Berridge's equivalent for Panksepp's seeking system. It is the liking system that Berridge believes is the brain's reward center. When we experience pleasure, it is our own opioid system, rather than our dopamine system, that is being stimulated. This is why the opiate drugs induce a kind of blissful stupor so different from the animating effect of cocaine and amphetamines. Wanting and liking are complementary. The former catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us to a satisfied pause. Seeking needs to be turned off, if even for a little while, so that the system does not run in an endless loop. When we get the object of our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), we engage in consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the brain and temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.

3 comments:

  1. Very interesting results, new to me.

    I am embarassed, but I have begun to run out of motivation with IJ. I'm around page 200. There are some gorgeous, brilliant passages to be sure. But I am starting to feel like I am in a fun house with no way out, no rationale, with people popping out to impress me (ooh cool writing) but nothing tying them all together. These weird French Canadians, in particular, leave me empty (except for the description of the wheelchair shadows over the Arizona landscape which is one of the amazing bits). I get the sense that they are supposed to leave me empty, but hmmmm.

    Is it less of a meaningless funhouse, or more of a Rubik's cube where DFW will eventually show me how things have meaning that fits together? I don't know how much more I can take of the modular approach.

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  2. Think of the joys of chess and how many of them would be lost on someone who had played only 3 or 4 times in their life. Give it another 100 pages and see if it's still leaving you without meaning.

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  3. OK, you convinced me to keep it going until page 350 at the very least.

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