THE HUMAN CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM must
stay continuously engaged with goal-driven activity
in order to sustain stable cognitive and affective
functioning. This is a biological constraint,
supported by what we currently understand about
dopaminergic reward circuitry, which is structured
not around the attainment of goals but around the
pursuit of them. When this drive is denied
expression and an organism capable of intricate
problem-solving is placed in an environment that
offers neither problems to solve nor agency over its
own circumstances, the system will generate its
own objects of attention. Like an iris in the dark
expanding to let in more light, the mind expands its
search for acceptable information, lowers its
standards and finds patterns in noise, stories in
random occurrence, and meaning in the incidental
features of whatever environment it has been
confined to. When structured input is removed,
the brain will hallucinate structure. Plummeting
into the absence of purposeful activity, the brain
will contrive purpose, desperately latching on to
whatever substrate is available to a vivid degree that
feels indistinguishable from genuine discovery.
These conditions, and the so-called surrogate
activities they inevitably produce, have become
psychotic ambient features of industrialized life.
Features generated not by deliberate prescription
but by the accumulated logic of economic and
technological systems that solve for efficiency,
comfort, and risk reduction while inadvertently
stripping from daily life the very thing the nervous
system cannot do without. We are, as a species,
parsing wallpaper at extraordinary scale.
