I guess we're not that far from Pavlov's dogs after all!

Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic last year, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting "enter" to get our next fix.

...
"The dopamine system does not have satiety built into it," Berridge explains. "And under certain conditions it can lead us to irrational wants, excessive wants we'd be better off without." So we find ourselves letting one Google search lead to another, while often feeling the information is not vital and knowing we should stop. "As long as you sit there, the consumption renews the appetite," he explains.

http://www.slate.com/id/2224932/pagenum/all

This is an article comparing the US' use of oil to someone who is addicted to alcohol or other drugs.

What I found more interesting than the comparison was the description of the addict's reactions early in the article. I'm not sure why, but I find addictive behavior very interesting (and scary at the same time!)

The great behavioral scientist Gregory Bateson, who studied addiction at the Langley Porter Institute in San Francisco during the 1950s, drew an analogy between the addict and a runaway car precisely to highlight the "system of addiction."

He wrote: "The panic of the alcoholic who has hit bottom is the panic of the man who thought he had control over a vehicle but suddenly finds that the vehicle can run away with him. Suddenly, pressure on what he knows is the brake seems to make the vehicle go faster. It is the panic of discovering that it (the system, self plus vehicle) is bigger than he is. ... He has bankrupted the epistemology of 'self-control.

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But the true costs of cheap oil -- a vast military presence in the Middle East; environmental damage, including global climate change; the need to support corrupt "oilygarchs" -- have never been paid by consumers at the fuel pump. And a half century of "special relationships" -- or, more precisely, addictive codependencies -- have only produced Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and, in the end, September 11, Osama bin Laden's murderous response to the permanent deployment of American troops in the oil-rich Saudi holy land.