Presently, I have a model of human psychology based around the premise that the brain simply requires a certain amount of stimulation. Lack of stimulation is psychologically painful–it manifests as boredom–and we go out of our way to avoid that feeling.

Humans have come up with countless ways to light up their brain, but there are some common themes: arts and entertainment, social contact, exercise, creativity, and psychoactive drugs.

The search for novelty and stimulation has left its footprint on history. Spices and dyes and exotic plants and animals have traveled the world to fulfill this need. Armed conflict broke out over the Medieval spice trade. It seems that humans are always searching for new media, new modalities to create art, to convey social signals, and to delight the senses.

There’s a cultural dimension to mental stimulation; certain forms are more socially-acceptable than others. But mental stimulation seems to be in some way non-negotiable: if for whatever reason you can’t get it in a healthy way, you’ll seek out alternatives. Of course, you could just turn to socially unacceptable forms of stimulation: drugs, porn, gambling, etc. But I’m more curious about forms of stimulation on the fringes: the counterintuitive and weird methods that people use to light their metaphorical candles. By their nature I can’t list many, but I have a couple.

In Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke describes people that have become addicted to pain in much of the same way that people can be addicted to pleasure, going to great lengths to take longer, colder ice baths. Neurologically, the pain manifests as a rise in dopamine, but subjectively this could fall into the same category as stimulation-seeking. Can the psychological pain of boredom actually outweigh the physical discomfort of an ice bath? Few maxims seem more primary in human behavior than the avoidance of discomfort, but it’s hardly the final say. People climb mountains, dive deep underwater, and watch daytime television, all in defiance of pain.

Consider “rage-bait” or “justice porn”, an old phenomenon that now proliferates on the Internet. It speaks to the inflaming power of anger. Outrage and righteousness are powerful forms of stimulation, and perhaps this is why we seek it out. Just as it’s counterintuitive to subject yourself to pain, why would you subject yourself to anger? I think people crave a fantasy world of “good” and “evil” and a clearly defined line between the two. So rarely in our daily lives do we have call for righteous anger–everything is nuanced and complex. As adults, it is our duty to empathize and seek to understand and correct transgressions systematically with the goal of a more-perfect community.

Since high school I have been enchanted by profundity. That was when I discovered philosophy and I teetered over an enticing abyss of intellectual thought. I craved the feeling of having my mind blown, of reconfiguring my mental models of the world over and over again. Over the years, I have found that science, philosophy, and literature have been the most fruitful and evergreen subjects in terms of mental stimulation. After taking a physics class for the first time, I remarked, along with my schoolmates, that I started to see it everywhere. Physics was all around me. It was like being taught how to see a color.

I suspect that we shouldn’t rely on a single source of mental stimulation. We should all at once be social and creative and active and curious.

That’s about it. I ran out of opportunities to use them, so I’ll just end this post with euphemisms for “mental stimulation”:

• whatever trips your trigger
• whatever tickles your fancy
• whatever floats your boat
• whatever knocks your socks off
• whatever tickles your pickle
• whatever blows your hair back
• whatever blows your skirt up
• whatever peels your potato