Seeking

Karen Pryor's wonderful book previously cited, Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us about the Animal Mind, asks in Chapter 9, "Why is the click so much fun?" (She's referring to the fun manifested by animals during clicker training.)
    Her search for answers led her to several neuroscientists, finally including Jaak Panksepp, who "is interested in the positive emotions, including having fun. He is somewhat notorious for his paper on laughing rats." Watch Panksepp tickle a rat in the "Laughing Rats" video in Chapter 10 at www.reachingtheanimalmind.com.
    Pryor writes:

One of Panksepp's primary interests is the hypothalamus, another part of the primitive brain [besides the amygdala, involved in fear responses] that is associated with basic emotions....
    Given stimulation in the same area of the hypothalamus, human medical subjects report a sense of excitement, a sort of restless eagerness, quite enjoyable really, although agitating. It seems as if something really marvelous is about to happen, if you can just figure out what it is. Panksepp identifies this phenomenon as being part of a system he calls the SEEKING circuit (this formal scientific term is spelled with capital letters)....
    There's a good evolutionary reason for searching for necessary resources, and the occasional success reinforces the process; however, there's more to it than that end goal. The urge to seek and explore needs to function not just when you are in need of food or warmth or shelter, but when you're feeling quite relaxed and happy already. That's when you have the energy and the desire to go exploring, so exploring needs to be reinforcing in itself, or we wouldn't get up and do it for "no good reason." [pp. 184-86]

Having borrowed a copy of Panksepp's 1998 textbook, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, from a UNC library, I began reading it yesterday as I waited to be seen by my neuro-ophthalmologist. Chapter 8 is about "SEEKING systems and anticipatory states of the nervous system." It begins with a striking quotation (which I only vaguely remembered) from Oliver Sacks's 1973 book, Awakenings:

"I feel saved," [Leonard L.] would say, "resurrected, reborn. I feel a sense of health amounting to Grace....I feel like a man in love. I have broken through the barriers which cut me off from love." The predominant feelings at this time were feelings of freedom, openness, and exchange with the world; of a lyrical appreciation of a real world, undistorted by fantasy, and suddenly revealed; of delight and satiety with self and the world.

    When I lay in bed this morning, creaky and reluctant to get up, I reminded myself of what I'd read in Panksepp. After only half a minute of only half-attentive "meditation" on the subject of the reading (was I stroking my own hypothalamus?), I induced in myself sufficient eagerness to arise and meet the world.