Several minutes later I wandered back down this winding internet garden path and returned to Carr’s article, feeling much less inclined to quibble. He argues that our internet use is rewiring our brains, that all the time spent scrolling and clicking makes it harder for us to sit down and do some sustained reading and thinking.

Carr gives compelling arguments, but still, it was with great joy that I started to read Jamais Cascio’s response, “Is Google Making Us Smarter?”, published in The Atlantic a year later. Cascio’s idea is that all this sharing of thoughts and information is creating a nöosphere, a collective consciousness, though he admits that finding the good content—especially on sites like Twitter—means sorting out blather that we don’t necessarily need in our lofty collective consciousness, “like ‘My kitty sneezed?’ and ‘I hate this taco!’”

Amid all this talk about how our internet use affects our brains’ hardwiring, it’s also interesting to consider how our brains affect our internet use. Last week, Slate’s Emily Yoffe published an article describing how “The brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting.” Yoffe gives a collection of anecdotes about different people and their wacky to the point of the obsessive internet search habits. When it comes to the internet, she writes, “we resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain.”

When those legendary lab rats were being studied, scientists inserted electrodes into their brain, giving the rats a jolt every time they wandered into a certain corner of their cage. One day the electrode was put in the wrong brain area, and the rat kept returning to the place where it would get shocked. It seemed the electrode was stimulating the rat’s pleasure center, but neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp thought differently. The animals did not look satisfied, but “excited, even crazed.” They were not blissing out, but feverishly sniffing around and foraging. Panksepp called this state “seeking” and says it is “the granddaddy of the systems,” the thing that motivates us to go out in the world and do things, seeking rewards. This system, Yoffe writes, depends on our dopamine circuits. According to Panksepp, dopamine circuits “promote states of eagerness and directed purpose… it’s a state humans love to be in.” So we seek out activities that keep the system aroused, like taking cocaine or amphetamines, or constantly refreshing our Twitter pages and Googling minutiae about celebrities or the news. (“Seeking,” which is thought to be dependent on dopamine, is not to be confused with “liking,” which depends on opioids in the brain.)

It’s an interesting idea, but can bits of information really be considered “rewards” in the same way that more tangible goodies—like food, sex, and shelter—can? Vaughan Bell, a clinical and research psychologist at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at King’s College London and a contributor to MindHacks doesn’t think so. In his response to the Slate article, Bell points out that the notion that dopamine motivates seeking behavior is one of several theories about how the dopamine system works, but his main issue with the piece is that it assumes that Google, Twitter, etc. function as rewards.

“As far as the brain is concerned,” he writes, “‘information’ encompasses all input from the senses. When you look at a tree searching for unusual patterns in the bark, you are getting information and rewards. We could just as easily rewrite the article as ‘how the brain hard-wires us to love forests, trees, and curious patterns in the bark.’”

Bell writes that the article confuses primary rewards—things that are necessary and universal (think food, sex, water)—with secondary, or learned rewards. “Secondary rewards are things like money, praise, and well… anything else, and that’s because we have to learn secondary rewards.” The thing about secondary rewards is that they can be so diverse—maybe internet searching is dopamine-dependent, but you first have to prove that the information gleaned in these searches is registering in the brain as a reward. “If you want to explain compulsive behaviour you need to explain how the behaviour has become rewarding, and this could be as varied and different as human nature itself.”

This is especially interesting to think about in light of another study out last week, which says that 40% of the posts on Twitter are pure nonsense. This is a surprise only to people who haven’t noticed that the site is called Twitter, and not Intellectually Rigorous Statements, that it gets its name from the pleasant but not particularly enlightening sounds that birds make. And yet, I like knowing Susan Orlean’s thoughts about drinking martinis at children’s birthday parties, or that Stephen Fry’s long morning walk around New York left him “a bit of a sweaty Betty.” Is it my dopamine system? Is it compulsive? It doesn’t feel that way. Can’t we have bad (or at least unproductive) habits because they’re fun ways to kill time, rather than because we’re responding to a neurological imperative? But then, what do I know – it could be a matter of time before my Tweet-checking spirals out of control and I am checking into reStart Internet Addition Recovery (an actual place, I swear) for my 45-day residential recovery program.

Image by Blimpa.

This spring, researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Impulse Control Disorders Clinic found that naltrexone, a drug used to treat alcoholism and drug addiction, successfully reduced symptoms of kleptomania.  In an 8-week study, the participants given naltrexone (as opposed to placebo) reported less intense urges to steal, and committed fewer thefts.  Pills that help regulate problem behaviors are great news, of course.  But how do they work?

The study reported that the drugs works by “blocks the effects endogenous opiates,” the chemicals in the brain that give the rush or thrill kleptomaniacs feel when they follow through on the urge to steal.

Although scientists don’t know for certain exactly how naltrexone works, they hypothesize that it blocks certain dopamine receptors.  But dopamine doesn’t just make shoplifting feel good, it is involved in creating feelings of pleasure and motivation, learning, promoting reward-seeking behavior, reacting to pain.  Would a drug that takes the fun out of stealing also take the fun out of other activities — healthy things that release dopamine and make us feel good?

I asked Dr. Jon Grant, one of the researchers who conducted the study, and he replied that none of the patients had complained of lack of enjoyment regarding other activities.  The pleasure and reward circuitry of addicts — and those afflicted with kleptomania and other compulsive disorders — works differently, and naltrexone seems to target this.  Grant says that the drug “seems to only affect the pathological activity.”

The success of the trial led researchers to investigate naltrexone’s effects on compulsive sexual behavior and pyromania as well; studies of both are currently underway.  Dr. Grant thinks the medicine might also prove beneficial for treatment of compulsive shopping.  Unfortunately for my friend though, it probably won’t ever cure those window-shopping-inspired longings for more stuff.

Photo by svandervelden.

Empathy has been getting a lot of news coverage recently.  After Justice Souter announced his intention to retire from the Supreme Court, President Obama gave a statement about the kind of person he would like to appoint as Souter’s replacement, saying, “I view the quality of empathy…as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions.”  Pundits quickly seized on the word empathy as code for particular political stance.  After being bombarded by ideas about what empathy means to the Left and the Right, it’s interesting to consider what it means to a different group: neuroscientists. 

Research on the neural basis of empathy mostly focuses on a set of neurons that have been identified in monkeys; these cells, which fire both when the monkey sees an action and when the monkey carries out that action itself, are called mirror neurons.  Mirror neurons were discovered in the early 1990s, when a team at the University of Parma found that the macaques they were studying had some neurons that responded both when the monkeys picked up a food item and when they saw humans pick up a piece of food.

It may seem like quite a leap from a monkey’s snack-behavior responses to human empathy, but neuroscientists like Christian Keysers and V.S. Ramachandran (who nicknamed the cells “Dalai Lama neurons”) have been studying the mirror system in humans and discovering that our brains may go through a process very similar to what the University of Parma researchers noticed in their macaques.  The human mirror system may influence language, social interaction, and our ability to put ourselves in others’ shoes.  Using brain imaging techniques like fMRI, researchers have found that the mirror system activates when we see or hear an action taking place, when we see someone else being touched, even when we see someone else make a facial expression denoting a feeling like happiness or disgust.

For the most part, the effects of the mirror system are subconscious: we may wince when we see someone punched, but we don’t physically experience the blow ourselves.  That is, most of us don’t.  In some people, the mirror system do more than heighten our susceptibility to pathos.  These people, who have a condition called mirror-touch synesthesia, actually experience physical sensations that they see other people experience.  If you have this type of synesthesia, seeing a person caressed, slapped, or tickled makes you feel as if the touch is happening to you.  At the American Synesthesia Association’s annual conference, several leading researchers discussed their findings, and explained this condition.  Jamie Ward, a neuropsychology researcher at the University of Sussex, explained that on a neurological level, the difference between mirror-touch synesthetes and others is quantitative, not qualitative: the same mirror systems are at work, but in mirror-touch synesthetes, the signals are stronger, and at a certain point “something clicks,” and where the rest of us have a subconscious reaction, synesthetes have a conscious experience.

Ward has studied mirror-touch synesthesia, and believes it is related to the development of empathy.  Noam Sagiv, of Brunel University’s Centre for Cognition and Neuroimaging, agrees.  Mirror-touch synesthesia — and the synesthesia-lite that the rest of us experience courtesy of our mirror neurons — is key to understanding how other people feel, he says.  “We don’t have any way of knowing if the person next to us has any conscious experience,” says Sagiv, whose approach to scientific explanation bends toward the playful.  “They could be zombies!  We assume they are not, of course.  We know automatically when someone is happy or in pain — that comes through the senses.”

Unsurprisingly, mirror-touch synesthetes score much higher than average on indices of empathy.  No word yet on whether they’re more likely than the general population to take an activist approach to jurisprudence.

Image by Michael Waterston

Earlier studies had shown estrogen — in female adults — protects against the negative effects of THC in memory and learning.  The female adults were rats, but the same may hold true for other mammals, like us.  (Good news, Frances McDormand!)  But a recent study shows that this does not hold true when rats have been exposed to THC during the rodent equivalent of adolescence — for rodent teen users, estrogen loses its protective effects in adulthood.

The study, conducted in Dr. Peter Winsauer’s Behavioral Pharmacology lab at Lousiana State University, used 12 female rats — half of whom had had their ovaries removed before the start of the experiment.  The rats were exposed to THC for 40 days, starting when they were about to go through puberty.  The day after their chronic THC treatment ended, they went through an extensive training process, learning to press different colored keys in a specific order to earn food pellets, despite just wanting to be left alone so they could watch cartoons and eat Cocoa Puffs out of the box.

After the training had been completed and the rats had reached adulthood, they were compared with a control group of 12 female rats — half with ovaries, half without.  When all the rats were administered THC and tested on their button-pressing prowess, those who had been given THC early in life performed significantly worse than those rats who were being given THC for the first time.

Dr. Winsauer says that this indicates that the effects of THC differ depending on age and estrogen content, but more importantly, that THC use during adolescence also affects how strongly the drug will affect the brain later in life.

Photo by unMuse