Post Carbon Fellow Peter Whybrow was quoted in an article on the science of craving in Intelligent Life Magazine.

From the article:

It’s reassuring to know that, as Peter Whybrow, director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour at UCLA, writes in his new book “The Well Tuned Brain” (W.W. Norton), “our acquisitive mania, with all its unintended consequences, has emerged not because we are evil, but because in a time of plenty, such ancient instinctual strivings no longer serve their original purpose.” On the phone, he tells me he is fascinated by the idea that “the consumer wants something continuously if you can give them novelty,” and agrees that the market economy has intensified the dopamine-wanting system. “We have yoked fundamental biology, putting wanting, liking and reward ?together into a cultural vision of what is progress. We’ve forgotten how you constrain desire.”

Take the construct of money, he adds. You can eat to the point of being satiated. You can even have enough of sex. But people never feel they have too much money. “So we’ve built this interesting system which now drives the biology.”