New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change

Anxiety over newness is at least as hoary as Future Shock, and there’s not much new to say about it, to judge by this scattered social think-piece. Journalist Gallagher (Just the Way You Are) takes a lightly scientific approach. She plumbs the evolutionary advantages of trying new things, warns that the dopamine jolts the brain emits to welcome stimulating novelties make us prey to video games and drug dealers, and classifies everyone according to their genetic and cultural predispositions to approach or avoid unfamiliar phenomena. (She is fascinated with the life stories of “neophiliacs,” such as astronauts, while disdaining “neophobes”—though they have their virtues—as evolutionary dead ends fit to be accountants.) She cannily occupies the sweet spot between celebrating today’s telecom marvels, reality shows, and social networking sites as an unprecedented eruption of creative newness and fretting that the flood of novel entertainments and “junk information” will make us distracted, shallow, and isolated. Gallagher is a fluent writer, and many of her riffs, like a brief history of boredom, sparkle. Still, novelty seeking makes a tenuous principle for analyzing personal and social psychology—is newness more significant now than in the age of Edison and the Wright brothers?—and one that feels old hat. (Jan.)