Web Grazing

Most of us have probably done this. You’re getting ready to study for an exam (for tomorrow!) and you think, “Ah, I really need to check my e-mail… What if the professor canceled the exam because her dog is getting a kidney transplant?” Wouldn’t want to study for nothing! So you get on the internet and while you’re checking you mail, you get a notice on Facebook and HAVE to check it out. Then you end up wasting about THREE HOURS browsing the internet, watching stupid videos of monkeys falling from trees, or cats licking dogs. What the hell?! It’s 3 in the morning and I still haven’t studied for my exam! FUCK!

Apparently, we as human beings really can’t help ourselves. And our brains actually think this is a GOOD thing! The internet is pretty much rapid fire, anything at your fingertips. It is instantly interesting and all-absorbing. We are sucked in to focusing on the internet because of the multitude of information, and our brains love to suck it all in and figure it out. Each website is a bundle of unprocessed, unknown information that our brains are dieing to find out.

“Coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’ “