Edward Morrow

Blog Entry 10/19/16

I chose to review the web article Desperately Seeking Sensation: Fear, Reward, and
the Human Need for Novelty for my rhetorical analysis. The article is written by
Brenda Patoine for The Dana Foundation website. The article covers how
neuroscientist are examining the brains of those who seek high sensation activities
and of those who look to avoid them. The hope being to compare the two and
determine how and why someone would look to put themselves in a high-risk
situation. The intended result of their research is to develop methods that would
help those who seek out high risk situations such as drug abuse without putting
themselves in danger. The article also covers how past methods to determine ones
category of risk taking are being used in conjunction with the neuroscience data.
Furthermore, there is a theory stated on how risk taking may linked to a persons
DNA and ends with discussing how dopamine produced in the body affects those
who look to engage in thrill seeking and how the brain decides between fear and
reward.
The intended audience of this text would be someone looking up information on
developments in neuroscience. Evidence for this is that the article was produced on
a website that is dedicated to news on neuroscience. More specifically the type of
people interested in this article may already have a background in neuroscience or
psychology as the jargon used throughout the article is very technical and specific.
A casual reader may not be able to understand right off the bat some of the
methods used during the research. Although, the article does try to explain some of
the more complicated sections so that if someone were to pick this up they would
not be entirely in the dark.
I believe the author has met with the purpose of the article very well and has gotten
the point across. Even though I do not have a background in this field I could
understand what the research being done was. And I could understand why it was
being done. I am sure that if I, a casual researcher, could make sense of this then
someone in the field would understand it. The intended audience seems suited to
the site the article was on as well as the material being covered. The author never
strayed in the article from the material and made sure that the style of the article
was consistent.