Is technology turning us all into junkies?

Last week the New York Times published a much-talked-about story that suggested that the urge to get online, check our phones, and otherwise connect with the tech world had become such a basic need that many -- if not most -- wired citizens were putting these tasks at the start of their day: Before breakfast and sometimes before even getting out of bed.

Many laughed off the story -- saying that this has been a trend in the works for a solid decade -- but few actually questioned why this was going on. How has the need to check our text messages before dawn become such a primal concern in our lives?

Slate's Emily Yoffe at last fills in the final piece of the puzzle, suggesting that our constant need to tap out queries at Google, to text incessantly, and to Tweet the most asinine of details until our fingers go numb is hard-wired into our brains.

How does it work? As Yoffe notes, these behaviors stimulate a certain part of the gray matter to create a strange emotional response. It's not part of the pleasure center of the brain, mind you. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp calls it the "seeking" region of the mind, where stimulation fulfills a deeply ingrained need to learn new things and which unleashes a flood of good-time dopamine into the system.

Panksepp calls seeking "the granddaddy of the systems," something which is responsible for some of the most basic drives of life. It's also an area that can create its fair share of problems. When rats have this area of their brain stimulated by electrodes, they act "excessively excited, even crazed," and human subjects even liken the response to a sexual arousal. In additional experiments involving this part of the brain, researchers have found that "people will neglect almost everything -- their personal hygiene, their family commitments -- in order to keep getting that buzz."

All that from poking around on the web or your cell phone?

Yeah, really. Our species is curious in that we "can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones" -- and that is what keeps us punching that refresh button and picking up the phone to see if any text messages have come in. This is hardly new: In older days, this was likely also the mechanism that kept us checking for voice mails or picking up the phone to make sure we had a dial tone when we were expecting a call. Before that, people would rush out to the mailbox over and over again to see if their daily correspondence had arrived. Now it's just much much easier to get that response, and it's obviously a powerful effect.

Is it a healthy one? Maybe not as much as we'd like. As Yoffe writes, "If humans are seeking machines, we've now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly." I have long struggled with borderline technology addiction and have had to work hard to set limits over what's appropriate. Part of that fix has involved setting my email client to fetch mail only once every 10 minutes instead of in real time. The chime of a new message coming in was feeling so good, I guess, that it was hard to focus on anything else. My work suffered, and in the past I've certainly become preoccupied with the online world at the expense of my family. All for a little dopamine, I guess.

Overall this is a fascinating piece. I highly recommend reading it through to the end. Try turning off your cell phone first. But text me later.