Addicted to Lost? Here’s the cure!
Incidentally, the Washington Post has an interesting piece on why Losties are also addicted to spoilers.
Now that producers have announced that the series will end in two short years, why can’t we just let ourselves sit back and be entertained? The answer to that lies, partly, in the phenomenon that psychologists and behavioral economists call “dynamic inconsistency” — our brain’s inability to reconcile what we want now with what we will want later.
“Right now, you feel this overwhelming desire to know the outcome of something,” says Jonathan Cohen, who researches dynamic inconsistency at Princeton. “In the future, when you’re actually reading the last chapter you wonder why you couldn’t wait.”
This field of study is still new, but Cohen’s team postulates that the drive for immediate gratification is located in our “lizard brains” — the instinctual part that believes our needs must be met now. The uniquely human part of our brains, the patient part that can recognize the value of waiting and savoring and saving, often loses out to the reptile, even now, even after all this evolution.
Blame the desire to read the last page first on your caveman ancestors.
Or, blame it on the Internet.
Read more at Washington Post
Lost, Lost Season 4, Lost addiction
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