The Impulse Factor: Hacking the novelty-seeking brain

Maybe you can relate. I was raised by aliens and so I know little of social norms. I usually guess and then I beat myself up rather than consider that my equipment is more or less normal.

Or at least I assumed it was normal.

But then I ran across a book, The Impulse Factor, which posits that about a quarter of us naked monkeys process dopamine poorly. That poor processing causes us to misbehave in search of the dopamine jolt we sorely need in order to feel normal. The book's author says the mutation behind the dopamine problem coincided with the diaspora of homo sapiens from Africa; in doing so, he joins a legion of non-fiction authors who claimed to find the one 'it' that drove the formation of human civilization. Earlier 'its' include coal and salt, so I'll let that pass.

What's especially intriguing for me, a poster child for those who bear the mutation (witness: can't sit through a meeting, pedalled cross country by myself, will try anything but heroin and meth once) is that short deadlines make our faulty little brains work really, really well. So all that procrastinating was actually just me biding time until my smart brain kicked in.

So now I'm toying with how to use the power of the smart brain without screwing myself on short deadline. There's a great essay on Structured Procrastination that meditates on how to use said downtime for good rather than for evil. Last night, I experimented with deliberate, structured procrastination by reading 200 pages of a friend's manuscript. I think the approach might be a winner. Instead of watching crappy ol' TV, or trying to play keyboard in my freezing garage apartment (don't ask) I could find inspiration by reading another human's work of art, rest my brain and prepare for a productive next day.

And the next day, when I did sit down to write, I knocked out 3,000 words of—get this—pleasurable prose. Incredible.

Now I'll be the first to admit that all these lifehacks work sort of OK some of the time. Productivity and flow, for me at least, are moving targets. Sometimes it's the bottom of the hour hack, sometimes it's the avoiding of all the evil timesucking web sites hack, and sometimes it's just reading late into the night and filling the proverbial well.

The end of FaceBook

Ok. Not really. But for me, yes. Three days ago, I decided to go cold-turkey from Internet surfing. That means no visiting my news stashes, MySpace, or Facebook at all. Nyet. Nix. Finis. So far, I can honestly say the results have been lovely. More time at work for social interactions and...well...productivity. More time in the evening for reading, music, being alone and content.

The bottom line is that life is really, really freaking short, and being here on earth is really, really freaking cool. Without the slightest doubt, when I'm on my deathbed I won't lament my lack of time-spent Internet surfing. But I will feel the satisfaction of having learned an instrument (when it happens), another language (Que suerte!), having taken walks and long naps outside, having spent time with friends, with kitties, with good books.

I will miss the plugged-in, hyper-aware media hound I was last week. But it's worth the sacrifice. I went to Walden, and it looked a lot like the world pre-1995.