The Psych Student

"Some questions can't be answered by Google" by Mykl Roventine

“For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. (Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak) Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones,” writes Emily Yoffe for Slate. In her essay discussing how the brain is wired for Google, Twitter, and texting… “And why that’s dangerous.”

I’ll get to that last bit of editorializing in a little bit.

“He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections” she writes, “about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.”

A better explanation of web’s place within the self-actualization area of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would be difficult to find. But what gets a little tedious, and almost looks like a method for marketing a bit of pop analysis, is when someone attaches a quick “and why it’s so dangerous” to anything having to do with technology and society.

We can do without a lot of the middle part of Yoffe’s essay and get to the kicker at the end:

“If humans are seeking machines, we’ve now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly. This perhaps should make us cautious. In Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin writes of driving two indoor cats crazy by flicking a laser pointer around the room. They wouldn’t stop stalking and pouncing on this ungraspable dot of light—their dopamine system pumping. She writes that no wild cat would indulge in such useless behavior: “A cat wants to catch the mouse, not chase it in circles forever.” She says “mindless chasing” makes an animal less likely to meet its real needs “because it short-circuits intelligent stalking behavior.” As we chase after flickering bits of information, it’s a salutary warning.”

Anyone who has carried out this exercise with a pet feline will realize that the animal will quickly leave it once the tell-tale whir of the can opener reaches its ears from the kitchen. This is because the cat, like people, are also identifying more than a hierarchy of needs, but rather a hierarchy of indicators for providing those needs. The light game only goes so far for providing that need. We don’t look for information blindly or endlessly. We look for it to satisfy an immediate need. The spelling of a word or the name or date of something in history. What time a film starts and at which cinema. What some see as dangerous could also be described as a transitory stage in the human process of outsourcing its collective memory into a set of tools to make it universally accessible. And perhaps instead of seeing it as a process of endless searching, we could see it as a step toward speeding up the act of finding.

There’s something interesting about the mistrust of technology, and I’m working on a larger post on the issue of luddites. (I realize if your read too many posts on htis blog you come across similar phrases throughout. Honestly, I’ve got far too many pending posts going.) That will include another look at this Slate piece as well, but in the meantime, what the mistrust of technology is to me is an inherent sense of self doubt. Technology is not a unique, separate natural force at work. It’s not a tornado that strikes at random or a shark that stalks a group of surfers. It’s human created and ultimately human controlled. The web is our own separate identities comingled and mashed up into different forms. If we distrust that, then it should say how we distrust each other and an integrated culture, because that’s what the web is, and technology is the means of accomplishing it.