The desiring brain

I have always found chasing ideas a very sensual experience. When I take interest in an idea and try to understand it, it takes a certain shape and texture, and sometimes even color and moving parts. I hold all that in my head until everything falls into their proper nooks and crevices. When that happens, I truly feel how connected certain things are and I also can feel that some of the links are as gravely clad as welded steel and some may be more flexible like a nylon cobweb. Only when I feel that can I sit and write. I carry a desire to chase after my own understanding of things and I know I not only think that; I am also sure that I feel it. That is why I chase after ideas week after week sharing them with interested readers and have been doing so for over seven years. To me, it is as sensual as probably taking a dip in a vat of dark chocolate and listening to the tender yet rousing cadence of Bach’s Gesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.

Some may call me nuts and dismiss my chase as a purely cold and cerebral enterprise. I may be nuts but to think of “understanding” as unfeeling may not be true. I came across an article that says that this “seeking” mode is the “granddaddy” of emotions — that whether we seek water, food or light, we are seeking creatures. I think this is why depression, which kills that desire to seek what the days and nights of our lives have yet in store for us, really robs us of who we are.

I was trying to look for a follow-up to a column I wrote a few weeks ago on what happens to brains which endlessly use media, whether Google, YouTube or texting, to search for new stimuli. In that column, I asked whether these people feel such rewards that they get hooked on these media and find it difficult to detach from these stimuli. Then I found Emily Yoffe’s article on Slate.com entitled “Seeking. How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous” posted last Aug. 12. She wove it for me and I was convinced that for now, this explains in good measure, why we seek and why we never stop doing so.

She cited the book of Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, that mentioned experiments with rats that when stimulated to search, just got stuck in a constant state of sniffing and foraging. It seemed like each search fuelled more and more searches, more and more doors to open. Sounds all too familiar to you now? Panksepp thinks that this basic emotion is deep-seated in all mammals. It is different from the feeling of satisfaction. Seeking is desiring. It is the emotion that drives us to get up in the morning and make the most of the day that has yet to unfold. Without it, our ancestors would have died of paralysis as to what to do next. It is the fiery wick of our life’s élan vital. And sometimes just the promise of finding anything is what keeps us going.   

We are no longer bound to seek hard and long for our physical needs as our prehistoric ancestors, but the wiring to seek is still there. We now get hooked in other searches, which now include the intangibles — meaning, joy — that fix which we think will get us settled. This is where dopamine kicks in to control our sense of time, getting us all fired up to search for next video, the next e-mail, the next tweet, the next text message, that will probably give us the answer to what we are looking for. But it never happens. We go seek some more. Yoffe mentioned another scientist, Berridge who has spent two decades studying the reward systems of the brain — the “liking” circuits. This is what puts a pause to our desire. He says it is our own internal opioid compounds that give you the feeling of contentment — that “blissful stupor” when you come upon the taste, sight, feel or smell you have been looking for. I think it is that feeling we speak of when we say something tastes so good that you forget your own name.

Knowing this now, makes me think of my own desiring and liking brain as a tipping scale between rushes of dopamine and opioid. When I end my columns, does that mean that a dash of opioid in my system has temporarily silenced the constant flow of dopamine that has generally taken over my seeking days and nights? And what about us humans with digital brains, as Yoffe, articulated, who have now developed the perfect searching machines that could keep us in a perpetual state of seeking? What happens when most of us do not arrive at a kind of definition about our own understanding of ourselves, of others and the world on which we are to base our actions? Do we end up like the rats in the experiment that keep on pulling the lever that electrocuted them until they collapsed?

Seeking is the feeling that all our ancestors of 200,000 years ago felt to move on with life — whether it be for the next resting place, the next meal, the next cave or the next mate. That was Google 200,000 years ago. A poet once asked me to tell him what I found most sensual. I told him it is chasing after ideas. Every time I am in the chase, I feel like I am in the midst of a storm with leaves being blown all over the place and I feel the wind and the slipping presence of tips of leaves that touch me. That to me is seeking, desiring. Then the wind settles and I catch a few leaves, bugs and drops of rain. That to me, at least for the moment, is discovery and understanding. And I write it and share it with you week after week.

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