Why Consciousness Seeks Information

The mind does not merely adapt to the world; it actively searches for novelty, meaning, and the signals that matter.

There are many ways in which the nervous system adapts to some conscious event, thereby reducing conscious access to it. But the opposite process occurs as well: There is extensive evidence that people seek out novel and informative conscious contents. We do not wait for the perceptual world to fade. We always go on to seek new and interesting things.

In sum, there seem to be two tendencies: one to reduce conscious access by adaptation, and a countervailing tendency to increase conscious access by searching for informative stimulation. These two tendencies may alternate, so that we seek conscious information, adapt to it, seek a new source of information, adapt to that, and so on. The process may approach a self-regulating homeostasis that tends toward optimal information flow.

Here we explore the search for information at different levels of conscious access: in perception, in conceptual processes, and in the domain of goals, where the search for information helps to define the significance of conscious input.

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Perceptual systems aim for informative parts of the field

In nature, all of an animal’s senses work together in active, coherent exploration. Upon hearing a surprising noise, a dog will prick up its ears; it will look toward the sound; its pupils will dilate, lungs expand to help sniff the air, nostrils flare to allow better smelling; the animal will even taste the in-breathed air as it flows over the tongue.

If the sound is interesting the dog will move toward it, constantly sniffing — looking, listening, and licking anything of interest. It is actively searching for information, for signals that make a difference in the search for food, for social and sexual partners, for dangers to avoid, and often for just plain novelty.

In the laboratory, by contrast, we usually examine only one perceptual system at a time; but the same overwhelming preference for information emerges there. There is extensive evidence that eye-movements focus on the most informative parts of a scene. Given a choice between predictable and unpredictable figures, people choose those that are moderately unpredictable: those with enough information to be interesting, but not so much as to be confusing or overwhelming with novelty. And it is well established that animals and people will work for informative stimulation without food or any other reward.

The same restless search for information characterizes conceptual processes, those that are abstract and not directly reducible to perception or imagery.'

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Conceptual processes aim for informative points

“Be informative” is a cardinal rule of normal discourse. In fact, violations of this rule are quite strange. When the same conceptual message is repeated over and over, we tend to turn away to other, more interesting and informative material. If we nevertheless try to pay attention to the same redundant material, we find that doing this is quite effortful, and ultimately impossible.

People do not ask questions about the things they already know — we always speak with a point of information in mind, either for the speaker or the listener. All these facts suggest that people seek conceptual information in the sense described above.

But what about apparent exceptions, such as repeated insistent demands for help, or a child’s pursuit of some desire? Surely messages like this can be repeated hundreds of times without adding new information. What about obsessive thoughts, which may recur thousands of times?

All of these cases can be reconciled with the idea that people search for novel information, if we interpret them within a goal frame. Goal frames are much more lasting and invariant than perceptual frames, and the same perceptual message — “Can I have that toy?” — may be repeated over and over again without losing its informativeness in the goal frame.

These phenomena can be described in the same terms, with the difference that conceptual processes involve a more abstract level of representation. Clearly the search for information can operate at many levels of representation, just as adaptation to information occurs at all levels of representation.

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