Are we hardwired to be information junkies?

WSJ covers some interesting research about the insatiable demand for information. The research indicates that humans are hardwired to seek out new information that can be interpreted in various ways:

In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom. It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those.

Now the constant craving for news, blogs and checking out Techmeme every other hour is explained! In addition, the research also could help explaining the success of Facebook's status message about the current activity of people (thereby continuously generating new information), similar to the micro-blogging concept. However, current activities are not that open to various interpretations, but probably more important, they are signals of the actions from people in our social network; that was important 10,000 years ago and hopefully will be for some time to come.