超常刺激：现代诱惑放大古老本能

灰雁会把滚出巢穴的蛋推回去。实验人员把台球、灯泡和排球放在附近，它也照样往回拖，而且物体越大，反应越强。一个原本有用的线索被夸张以后，动物对仿造物的反应甚至超过了真正的蛋。

现代食品精确调整盐、糖和脂肪的组合，社交媒体把大量认可压进几分钟，游戏、广告和色情内容不断提高刺激的密度与变化速度。它们利用的仍是古老偏好，强度却已经远远超过这些偏好形成时的环境。这是 旧适应落进新环境 后更主动的一层，产品会继续测试什么最能让人回来。

把这种吸引力全算成意志薄弱，会漏掉对手已经被长期优化。书里还说大脑的奖励中心约五万年没有改变，原笔记当场留下了“Why?? How long??”。这个年数没有得到进一步核实，保留在原文里就好，不替作者把它说成定论。

原笔记里的批注：

Note: Why?? How long?? #Insight

For example, the greylag goose is a ground-nesting bird. Occasionally, as the mother moves around on the nest, one of the eggs will roll out and settle on the grass nearby. Whenever this happens, the goose will waddle over to the egg and use its beak and neck to pull it back into the nest. Tinbergen discovered that the goose will pull any nearby round object, such as a billiard ball or a lightbulb, back into the nest. The bigger the object, the greater their response. One goose even made a tremendous effort to roll a volleyball back and sit on top. Like the baby gulls automatically pecking at red dots, the greylag goose was following an instinctive rule: When I see a round object nearby, I must roll it back into the nest. The bigger the round object, the harder I should try to get it. 《Atomic Habits》，Location 1247 A supernormal stimulus is a heightened version of reality—like a beak with three red dots or an egg the size of a volleyball—and it elicits a stronger response than usual. Humans are also prone to fall for exaggerated versions of reality. Junk food, for example, drives our reward systems into a frenzy. After spending hundreds of thousands of years hunting and foraging for food in the wild, the human brain has evolved to place a high value on salt, sugar, and fat. Such foods are often calorie-dense and they were quite rare when our ancient ancestors were roaming the savannah. When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, eating as much as possible is an excellent strategy for survival. 《Atomic Habits》，Location 1255 Placing a high value on salt, sugar, and fat is no longer advantageous to our health, but the craving persists because the brain’s reward centers have not changed for approximately fifty thousand years. The modern food industry relies on stretching our Paleolithic instincts beyond their evolutionary purpose. 《Atomic Habits》，Location 1261 Ultimately, such strategies enable food scientists to find the “bliss point” for each product—the precise combination of salt, sugar, and fat that excites your brain and keeps you coming back for more 《Atomic Habits》，Location 1272 Look around. Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in. Stores feature mannequins with exaggerated hips and breasts to sell clothes. Social media delivers more “likes” and praise in a few minutes than we could ever get in the office or at home. Online porn splices together stimulating scenes at a rate that would be impossible to replicate in real life. Advertisements are created with a combination of ideal lighting, professional makeup, and Photoshopped edits—even the model doesn’t look like the person in the final image. These are the supernormal stimuli of our modern world. They exaggerate features that are naturally attractive to us, and our instincts go wild as a result, driving us into excessive shopping habits, social media habits, porn habits, eating habits, and many others. 《Atomic Habits》，Location 1277 If history serves as a guide, the opportunities of the future will be more attractive than those of today. The trend is for rewards to become more concentrated and stimuli to become more enticing. Junk food is a more concentrated form of calories than natural foods. Hard liquor is a more concentrated form of alcohol than beer. Video games are a more concentrated form of play than board games. Compared to nature, these pleasure-packed experiences are hard to resist. We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face. 《Atomic Habits》，Location 1283

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