Knowledge Junkies

An interesting new study from a noted visual recognition researcher suggests that the reason humans seek to understand concepts, recognize visual displays, and do perhaps any number of other cognitive tasks is because it stimulates our pleasure-producing endogenous opiates. Think about that all you school nerds next time you try to argue that learning and thinking is a more worthy pursuit than bypassing that process altogether and stimulating your opium receptors by a more direct, but less natural means. Just kidding - don't do drugs. But it is curious how the same reward systems can motivate such disparate courses of action, and in both the physical and mental realms.