When I looked back at the various activities & people that have populated my approximately 1/2 complete existence, I realized that fundamentally I obsess over them -- sometimes for a day, sometimes for a month, sometimes off and on for years. Obsessing over people might be considered (more than) a little creepy, but what I mean is that when someone is really interesting to me, I want to spend a lot of time with them... And as far as activities go, well, ditto.
It is really all about the nature of the experience, be it a physical activity, a skill, a person, a place of residence, etc. The word on the street is that you need 10,000 hours to become an expert at something (see research done by Anders Ericsson), a state clearly qualitatively different from being a novice. But I wonder: what happens at 5000 hours? Or 500 hours? or 1 hour? I propose that:
qualitative changes in one's experiences occur on a logarithmic timescale.
i.e. you need to double (or multiply by some factor) the amount of time you put into the experience for it to be markedly different.
Take travel. If you visit a place for a day, that's interesting. If you visit for a week, that's a lot different. And staying for a couple months -- different again.
Take learning to play piano. An hour and you can plunk out a melody. A week, and probably a few chords & scales. But it will take more than another week to smoothly and expressively play a simple concerto.
Take a friendship. "Hello" is the usual start, followed perhaps by lunch, then a weekend, then increasing contact perhaps lasting a lifetime. Tell me the friend you've known since you were 3 isn't qualitatively different from the friend you met in Now -(YourAge-3)/2 ? (for me, about 1972 vs. 1992)
Some obsessions don't have that reward: the first time you ride a roller coaster is incredible, and while future rides are fun, eventually the novelty (or the fear or whatever...) wears off, and the value per repetition goes down. Perhaps this is where bad obsessions come from: things that aren't by-their-nature sufficiently complex or, in other words, lack the depth to provide a qualitative change in experience with sufficient time.
Deciding to focus on something or someone is about going up this scale of qualitative experience, from the quick & shallow to the (often, or at least hopefully) unmeasurably deep. As you go up this scale, the reward (in terms of novelty, recognition, singularity, intensity etc) tends to increase, as does the cost: an ever more disproportionate share of your finite number of waking hours, your nigh-priceless currency.
So, to clarify what I meant "obsess" above:
obsession is the ongoing decision to devote your time to an experience.
As noted, the more time you devote to something, the more fascinating the experience can be, for it is perforce shared with fewer people and you will have few such very deep experiences in your life.
It is this logarithmic time dependency of qualitative experience which makes me quite regret making some suboptimal relationship choices. I no longer will, in all likelihood, ever have a 50 year anniversary with my partner, though I hope I will have a 25 year one day. And it is this, the depth of experience, which is a big part of why I want a child: I want that unique long connection with another soul who shares (approximately) half of my DNA.
Obsession is often thought of negatively -- a disorder, a problem. It can be, if awareness and attention (or "mindfulness", in the current parlance) isn't applied. But even then, the reward is still there, the dopamine system dispensing a little sub-microgram splash of cerebral satisfaction with each repetition.
It is even more likely that the neurotransmitter reward is even greater for deeper, unarguably positive choices.
Hence, I find it to be unescapable:
Obsession is its own reward.
In this blog, I will share with you my obsessions: the thoughts, the people, the communities, the activities, the things, or in other words, that on which I have chosen (or am choosing, and not always wisely!) to spend my temporal currency. And we'll see... will this blog lead to some qualitatively new experiences as I reach 4, 16, and 64 posts...?
How fantastic! I look forward to missives from the inside of your head with great anticipation.
ReplyDeleteA few things that you may want to look into:
ReplyDelete-I've heard that Andy Warhol said that you should do something once or you should do it every day. I think your thesis about qualitative changes on a logarithmic scale is what underlies his advice. That first time is the steepest change and you need discipline choosing only a few things to really sink yourself into to get your 10,000 hours in and have those 50th anniversaries. I like however the way that your view is less proscriptive and outlines the trade-offs in ways that allow people to make educated decisions about where the sweet spots lie for them.
- Look into Helmholtz' Law of Psychophysics, which says that broadly across many types of perception, a just noticeable difference psychologically depends on the log of the objectively physical quality. That is, if you can tell by feel the difference between a 5g weight and a 7.5 g weight, you can also tell the difference between a 100g weight and a 150g weight, but not the difference between a 100g and a 105g.
- The longest relationship most people have in their lives is not with a spouse, child or friend, but with siblings. I've read favorable and interesting reviews of a book called "The Sibling Effect" by Jeffrey Kluger which explores research on sibling relationships.
Oh, and I forgot. I think the modern mainstream neuroscience view of the dopamine system has changed from the reward center view you suggest here. It seems like a dopamine signal is less of a reward and more of an error signal. A burst of dopamine is less "That was great!" than "That was unexpected." Most of what I know is from a book called _Your brain is (almost) perfect: How we make decisions_ by Read Montague. It's a really good and fairly accessible read. (It was originally released under the (IMO superior) title _Why choose this book?: How we make decisions._)
ReplyDeleteInteresting thoughts Barry.
ReplyDeleteWhat intrigues me is how the chemical, cognitive and emotional systems (arguably "biological" / "chemical" too but then we could get very philosophical if we walk too far down that route!) interact. How (if at all) are the purely chemical systems "amplified" by the cognitive / emotional systems? Is that 'sub microgram splash' a flat response that is transformed by the cognitive processes?