Recuperando el placer de la lectura… ("libros", EN)

We are still learning how to live in this information ecosystem, and how to build the ecosystem for humans rather than for the information. 



How Making Time for Books Made Me Feel Less Busy

Understanding Our Brains, Part 1: Dopamine, pleasure, and learning bad habits

…Humans brains, it turns out, are built to privilege new information over just about anything else (including, some suggest, food and sex). The promise of that new information…triggers the release of a neurotransmitter—dopamine—in the brain. Dopamine makes us more alert to the promise of potential pleasure, and our brains are wired to seek out things that generate dopamine.

There is a learning loop to this process—new information + dopamine = pleasure—that lays down neural pathways that “teach” your brain that there is a reward for pressing the email refresh button…

Understanding Our Brains, Part 2: The energy costs of flitting around

While the addictive attraction of new information is one side of the problem, the other side is the cost of jumping from one thing to the next and back again.

The typical human brain is about 2% of the body’s weight, but it consumes in the range of 20% of the energy… when you are relaxing or staring out the window, your brain is “at rest,” and uses around 11 calories per hour. Focused reading for an hour will use up around 42 calories. But processing lots of new information takes around 65 calories per hour. …

Every time you pop out of your work to read an email, it costs you not just time, but energy too. …

So what do we do?

Keep on reading…