the brain is very bad at communicating certain needs to the systems that can get those needs met.
It’s not so much that the brain is bad at communicating, as that you have a bad expectation lodged in it. Or in common idiom, “you can never get enough of what you don’t really need in the first place.”
Example: last month I did a workshop and the demonstration volunteer was spending too much time on Twitter instead of working. Turns out, even if he spent “25 hours a day” (his words) on Twitter, it still wasn’t going to fix the hole in his social life that was left by not working at an office any more. His brain had latched onto Twitter as a partial substitute, and was trying like crazy to make it work.
So I (sort of) agree with your general idea of akrasia as experiential pica. But IMO the cause (in both akrasia and pica) is erroneous information in your brain’s planning table that predicts you will get an increase in what you want/need if only you eat ice or get on twitter. The rest of the machinery can be functioning perfectly normally.
My wife, for example, satisfies her iron cravings by eating liver and almonds, while until I knew I was potassium deficient, I satisfied my cravings mainly with raisins. (Now I try to substitute apricots, which have more potassium and less sugar.)
This raises the question: how did our brains know? The PCT explanation would be that we have internal controllers for how much iron or potassium is required, and the normal predictive function of memory is sufficient to link the perception of a particular taste/smell with the following rise in nutrient availability. So the controllers for nutrients simply request a perception of the tastes in question, causing goal-seeking behavior to make you hunt down the remembered food.
What’s really interesting about pica, though, is that in order for this to happen with eating ice, there would have to be a hard-wired association between crunching and iron—since there is no way for that association to be learned by the usual pathway. (For any non-food other than ice that actually contains iron, note that the usual predictive pathway and controller behavior suffices as an explanation. For ice, we can assume that it’s the only crunchy thing you can keep eating without incurring conflict from your general appetite controller.)
It also raises the question of whether pica sufferers(?) ever had any iron-rich foods, or whether perhaps a pica sufferer not only has an iron deficiency, but a taste-learning problem. If it’s a taste-learning problem, then we might expect pica sufferers to have a different response to the Shangri-la diet than non-pica sufferers.
Bake an enormous batch of cookies. Knock on your neighbors’ door, tell them you’re never going to be able to eat all of these cookies, and ask them if they want some. Repeat until this turns into a conversation or you run out of cookies.
On the other hand, that would mean parting with delicious, delicious cookies! I couldn’t do that! ;)
And my neighbors probably wouldn’t appreciate being woken up at four in the morning, either. :(
Indeed, “being lonely” is something I should be able to fix. There are lots of people I used to know that I could get in touch with, and at least one lives pretty close by and has said I can drop in any evening I want. It’s just so hard to get off the computer...
Assuming the person in question uses e-mail or instant message clients or whatever, you don’t need to get off the computer in order to tell him you’ll be dropping by. It’s much easier to get up once you have an actual time limit you need to meet in order to avoid being late.
If you believe that you spend that time on the computer because you’re lonely, this would seem to be a prime example of “experiential pica”. If I were you my hesitation would probably be inertia, feeling like it would be odd to just stop in even if they left that offer open. In which case, perhaps you ought to will yourself to do it a first time so that it becomes more normal. You have little to lose, presumably.
Yes, the internet, sometimes it’s a substitute for company, but I think sometimes I spend a lot of time on the net reading what smart people have written (and there’s no end to it) as a kind of substitute for exercising my own creative intelligence. Reading other people’s smart stuff pushes a lot of my buttons intellectual-satisfactionwise but not all of them by any means. And that makes it feel like a kind of voyeurism.
Speaking of the net, I guess porn is a good example, in some ways it’s very close to something you want, but in other ways it’s nowhere near it.
It’s not so much that the brain is bad at communicating, as that you have a bad expectation lodged in it. Or in common idiom, “you can never get enough of what you don’t really need in the first place.”
Example: last month I did a workshop and the demonstration volunteer was spending too much time on Twitter instead of working. Turns out, even if he spent “25 hours a day” (his words) on Twitter, it still wasn’t going to fix the hole in his social life that was left by not working at an office any more. His brain had latched onto Twitter as a partial substitute, and was trying like crazy to make it work.
So I (sort of) agree with your general idea of akrasia as experiential pica. But IMO the cause (in both akrasia and pica) is erroneous information in your brain’s planning table that predicts you will get an increase in what you want/need if only you eat ice or get on twitter. The rest of the machinery can be functioning perfectly normally.
My wife, for example, satisfies her iron cravings by eating liver and almonds, while until I knew I was potassium deficient, I satisfied my cravings mainly with raisins. (Now I try to substitute apricots, which have more potassium and less sugar.)
This raises the question: how did our brains know? The PCT explanation would be that we have internal controllers for how much iron or potassium is required, and the normal predictive function of memory is sufficient to link the perception of a particular taste/smell with the following rise in nutrient availability. So the controllers for nutrients simply request a perception of the tastes in question, causing goal-seeking behavior to make you hunt down the remembered food.
What’s really interesting about pica, though, is that in order for this to happen with eating ice, there would have to be a hard-wired association between crunching and iron—since there is no way for that association to be learned by the usual pathway. (For any non-food other than ice that actually contains iron, note that the usual predictive pathway and controller behavior suffices as an explanation. For ice, we can assume that it’s the only crunchy thing you can keep eating without incurring conflict from your general appetite controller.)
It also raises the question of whether pica sufferers(?) ever had any iron-rich foods, or whether perhaps a pica sufferer not only has an iron deficiency, but a taste-learning problem. If it’s a taste-learning problem, then we might expect pica sufferers to have a different response to the Shangri-la diet than non-pica sufferers.
I think I surf the internet because I’m lonely.
Bake an enormous batch of cookies. Knock on your neighbors’ door, tell them you’re never going to be able to eat all of these cookies, and ask them if they want some. Repeat until this turns into a conversation or you run out of cookies.
That would probably work, if I did it.
On the other hand, that would mean parting with delicious, delicious cookies! I couldn’t do that! ;)
And my neighbors probably wouldn’t appreciate being woken up at four in the morning, either. :(
Indeed, “being lonely” is something I should be able to fix. There are lots of people I used to know that I could get in touch with, and at least one lives pretty close by and has said I can drop in any evening I want. It’s just so hard to get off the computer...
Define “enormous” to mean “far more than you could possibly eat”.
We’re talking about cookies. By the time the second batch is done, your appetite will have returned!
(This is why I never make too much mashed potatoes—instead of refrigerating, I just sit there trying to eat it all.)
We’re gonna need a bigger oven
Assuming the person in question uses e-mail or instant message clients or whatever, you don’t need to get off the computer in order to tell him you’ll be dropping by. It’s much easier to get up once you have an actual time limit you need to meet in order to avoid being late.
If you believe that you spend that time on the computer because you’re lonely, this would seem to be a prime example of “experiential pica”. If I were you my hesitation would probably be inertia, feeling like it would be odd to just stop in even if they left that offer open. In which case, perhaps you ought to will yourself to do it a first time so that it becomes more normal. You have little to lose, presumably.
Yes, the internet, sometimes it’s a substitute for company, but I think sometimes I spend a lot of time on the net reading what smart people have written (and there’s no end to it) as a kind of substitute for exercising my own creative intelligence. Reading other people’s smart stuff pushes a lot of my buttons intellectual-satisfactionwise but not all of them by any means. And that makes it feel like a kind of voyeurism.
Speaking of the net, I guess porn is a good example, in some ways it’s very close to something you want, but in other ways it’s nowhere near it.