That second response — the brain’s wish for us to generally avoid pain — is the one that is also triggered when we try to do a familiar thing in an unfamiliar way.

For example, one of the tests that was quoted in my class involved forcing people to write with their “off” hands while their brainwaves were being monitored. Their feelings registered very similarly to how you’d feel if someone made you stand near a dangerous animal or told you they were going to hit you; worried, anxious, frustrated, etc.

The same readings held true for cognitive issues as well. Students in one study were shown fake news stories of a familiar, pleasant or benign public figure in which it was reported that they had done something very bad. Now, you’d expect that to register as “yuck” on the old brain scan. But the same thing happened when they did the reverse and showed articles that claimed bad people had been proved innocent or done good things.

The basic point my prof was trying to make is that the first way we learn to do something ends up being strengthened over time. It’s like the roads around Boston. They follow paths that were originally designed by cows. The cows wore narrow paths in the dirt, which became country roads, which became larger roads, which eventually became Route 128. You use something, it gets stronger. You don’t, it’s a pain to make it work another way.

Mostly we try to avoid pain. And for many people, that translates into a marked desire to avoid change; and learning is a kind of change. Lots of people really, really don’t like school or having to learn new job skills. It’s hard. Why? Because it forces you to do different stuff with your brain.

A concept I’ve brought up before is “The Beginner’s Mind.” This Buddhist idea is one that suggests we should examine the feelings of frustration, fear, anxiety (whatever) that grip us when we’re challenged with a new situation, and learn not only how to deal with them… but how to actively seek them out and cherish them.

Creativity thrives on change. Not always huge change; sometimes very incremental, subtle change. But if you are afraid of change — if you associate it with pain, loss or confusion — you won’t be able to create anything new.

That’s one of the reasons I worry a bit about advertising supported search on the Web. And about our current search tech. They tend to “bubble up” the same stuff again and again. The easy stuff. The stuff we found last time. There are ways to go deeper, search more granularly or boisterously… but if the emphasis shifts even further to commercial models, we may find non-commercial Web activities becoming ever more “painful.”

You bring up the “pain sector of brain lights up when situations requiring new information are encountered” phenomenon. I like your prof’s theory, that we react to learning in the same way that we react to discomfort because it’s a survival trait — known behaviours are usually safer than new and untested ones. Ergo, the brain itself discourages learning.

However, I have a bit of a problem with the last portion of this theory. Learning does not actually feel painful, and that may be a crucial point, here. Having the neural center of the brain associated with discomfort light up and having the brain process/transmit pain signals are not necessarily the same thing.

Intense anxiety does feel like having a thumb slammed in a drawer, only minus the pain, itself. The two are primarily similair in that you get the same sort of physiological background noise with both — increased heart-rate, pulse, adrenaline levels, restlessness, a certain proneness to reactivity, etc.

Now I’ve read that 90% of the activities an average individual engages in are actually learned or automated — 90% because that list includes some really basic stuff like breathing, reaching up to scratch an itch, crossing the living room to reach the kitchen, flicking on a light in a familiar room, driving to work, etc. From what I understand, the really interesting thing about the human brain is that it is designed to be adaptable — rather than beginning as a stable map of constant responses or instincts (swim upstream, spawn and die)the human brain has the ability to develop instincts, alter them when they no longer work, or even drop them altogether. Even more intersting is the brain’s ability to shove so much activity off the psychic main stage and into the subconscious.

Now, in re-considering the brain’s tendency to access the neural cluster associated with pain, it may very well be that the brain is not so much actively discouraging learning, but intensifying the same sense of vigilance that normally accomponies pain — in other words, triggering a stress response could be the brain’s way of shouting “Hey you! Wake up! We have a series of “does not compute” signals! This could be important! Snap out of auto-pilot!” Couldn’t it? (see, I told you this was leading to a question).

That being said, it is, as you seemed to be hinting at, a good time to consider who the arbiter of this potential massive change really is. It’s comforting to know that Google’s mantra is “Do No Evil”, but is that mere propaganda in a greater campaign for something going on behind closed doors? They’ve seen my e-mails, and I don’t really care. But now I want to see theirs. How do we know that their definition of “Evil” does not include marketing Scientology books to someone who searches for “religion”? They’ve made some documented decisions to disclude certain content before — it’s certainly just as easy to include hand-picked advertising. Not saying I have ANY reason to think this is the case — I’d just like to be sure this power is in the right hands.

Thanks for the Dyson articles — off to read that now.