Humans evolved to seek out sugar because it was a scarce source of energy. But when we learned how to produce sugar on an industrial scale, our love for sweet things went from an evolutionary asset to a liability. The same is now true of data. In an age of information overabundance, our curiosity, which once focused us, now distracts us. And the insatiable appetite for distraction is ruining the minds of both content creators and their audiences.
The analogy between information and sugar is not just a pretty metaphor. A 2019 study by Berkeley researchers found that new information can act on the brain’s dopamine-producing reward system in the same way as food, whether or not the acquired information is useful. Put simply, the brain treats the receipt of new information as a reward in itself, and can grow to crave it for its own sake, regardless of its quality.
For hundreds of millennia, this wasn’t a problem, because on the plains of the savanna, or in the depths of the jungle, information was as scarce and precious as honey. But this all changed with the rise of the printing press, industrialized societies, and, of course, the Internet.
We now live in what might be called an attention economy, full of actors seeking to draw our interest by any means possible. Since low-quality information is just as effective at
— source quillette.com | Gurwinder Bhogal | 26 Jul 2022