Our fixation on burning issues such as Anna Nicole Smith's growing pool of baby's daddy contenders is a symptom of our addiction to Hollywood gossip, says the author of a new book on the cult of celebrity.

Twenty years ago, stories on celebutante Paris Hilton's sexual romps might have been limited to People magazine.

"But today you are just as likely to see stories on celebrities on CNN," Jake Halpern told CTV.ca in a telephone interview from New Mexico.

And with the proliferation of Internet sites such as MySpace and YouTube, "fame is attainable in a way it never was before," said Halpern, journalist and author of "Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America's Favorite Addiction" (Houghton Mifflin).

This could explain why "Paris Hilton" was the top Google search term for news articles and Britney Spears was No. 1 on Yahoo's annual list of the most-searched for terms on the Internet last year.

News networks that are increasingly concerned about the loss of viewers perceive "rightly to some extent" -- that celebs are the antidote to that, Halpern said.

All these factors are contributing to the addiction that is spreading among the teen and tween demographics, who crave the rush of getting close to stars, he says.

One of the book's most startling revelations came from a survey Halpern conducted of more than 650 middle-school students in the Rochester, N.Y. area.

Given the choice of becoming the CEO of a major corporation, the president of Harvard or Yale, a Navy SEAL, or a celebrity's personal assistant, nearly half of the girls chose to become an assistant.

The survey also showed that the more likely youth were to receive bad grades and report not being well-liked by their peers, the more likely were they choose becoming a personal assistant.

"For kids who didn't feel good, particularly girls who got bad grades and didn't feel well-liked, becoming an assistant seemed very attractive," Halpern said.

"They're thinking 'I may not be talented or beautiful or popular enough to have this life, but as an assistant, that might be my best trajectory onto the red carpet,'" he said.

In another telling statistic, girls who were provided with a list of famous names with whom they could share a meal picked Jennifer Lopez over Jesus Christ. However, the Son of God did top Paris Hilton and 50 Cent.

Small talk on big stars

The cult of celebrity may be going strong because it helps us make friends, according to a theory by uber-magazine-editrix Bonnie Fuller.

Fuller suggests celebrities are a means to bring us together as they facilitate small talk.

"All this research out there shows we are more isolated than we ever have been in the past," Halpern said. "

We live alone more often, get married later in life, we work in cubicles -- we don't have sense of community we once did," he said.

While people are more isolated from each other, they are all exposed to the same popular culture and stories on celebrities give us a common link, he said.

"I may not know you, you may not know about me, but we both know about J-Lo, Tom and Katie, and Paris and we can talk about them as if we know them," Halpern added.

"My father, for example, who is a bookish political science scholar, knows about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes because he hears about it everywhere," he said, adding that would not have been the case a short time ago.

Star-watchers also seek out celebrity news because they are a tonic to their own feelings of loneliness, Halpern said.

"I think that as the news continues to be bad in the outside world, this is just going to become increasingly an attractive escape," he said. Still other evolutionary psychologists argue that humans who historically paid attention to status and power did better.

It makes perfect sense to Arizona State University evolutionary psychologist Douglas Kenrick that it is irresistible thumbing through magazines to look at Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Kenrick explains in the book that just as those who paid attention to status fared better, "the same is true of those who paid attention to fertile women who looked like they might be interested in sex."

Duke University's Dr. Michael Platt, who has conducted research on monkeys, believes those who were more adept at gathering information on dominant males and sexually receptive females may have had better chances at surviving and reproducing.

This theory may well apply to celebrity-watching, believes Platt, of the university's Department of Neurobiology.

"In our society this ancient behavioural adaptation may now just be going wild," Platt suggested to Halpern.

"The media have simply expanded our social group to include practically everyone on the planet, so we get stuck gazing at powerful celebrities we don't even know."

Ultimately, he speculates, those who isolate themselves from celebrity news may struggle to socialize.

"It's quite possible that they would fail to integrate into society, appear strange, get no dates and ultimately not reproduce. So theoretically, those who tune in to celebrities may end up with an advantage in the reproductive race," Platt said.

An excerpt from "Fame Junkies" by Jake Halpern

Anyone who has ever been in the limelight, even for participating in a high school musical or telling a good story at a cocktail party, can attest to the fact that there is a rush that comes with commanding everyone's attention. Isn't it possible that this feeling is, in fact, addictive? Isn't it possible that many behaviors related to fame - including becoming famous, being near the famous, and even reading about the famous - trigger a rush, a high, or even a numbing effect that is potentially addictive?

In search of answers, I paid a visit to Dr. Hans Breiter at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Dr. Breiter is large teddy bear of a man, well over six feet tall, but with soft facial features and a neatly trimmed red beard. He is one of the nation's top experts on the neurological underpinnings of addiction and he spends most of his days working in a laboratory that is equipped with several giant MRI machines. Typically the magnetic fields generated by MRI machines vary in strength by a measure called "teslas" and you can actually feel the difference between the various machines. When you approach the lab's most powerful 7-tesla MRI machine, for example, you'll sense a slight pull on your feet. This is because there are innumerable microscopic pieces of metal embedded in your shoes that are gravitating toward the machine's magnet. When I visited the lab, Dr. Breiter was guiding a subject into a 3-tesla MRI machine. Once the subject slid into this device, he was asked to play a "game of chance," in which he observed a small computer screen that showed a spinning roulette wheel. Every time the wheel stopped spinning, the monitor informed the subject how much money he had just won or lost. This was "real money," Dr. Breiter explained, because at the end of the experiment subjects were allowed to keep their winnings. As this experiment continued, Dr. Breiter and his colleagues huddled around a small computer screen to see how the subject's brain was reacting to his wins and losses.

Within the last several years, Dr. Breiter has gained a great deal of attention for his research on how our brains react both to "games of chance" and to cocaine use. (He has done another experiment, similar to the one I witnessed, in which he gives subjects intravenous infusions of cocaine while they are inside an MRI machine.) Dr. Breiter has demonstrated that both activities affect an area of the brain known as the "reward-aversion system." Basically, whenever you feel a rush of pleasure or of pain, that feeling originates from this system. Ever since the dawn of man, the reward-aversion system has played a key role in human evolution. It punishes us with pain when we harm ourselves and it rewards us with pleasure when we do things that help us survive and reproduce like eating and having sex. In addicts, this delicate system essentially starts to malfunction. Cocaine users tamper with their reward-aversions system by artificially inducing feelings of euphoria, and they ultimately succeed in changing the chemistry of their brains so that they crave more and more of the drug in order to feel good. Dr. Breiter speculated that a similar thing might occur with gambling. He tested this idea in relatively simple fashion. When his subjects were in the MRI machine, either gambling or high on cocaine, he asked them to rate how they were feeling. In both cases, he found that identical parts of the brain "lit up" when gamblers and cocaine-users indicated that they were feeling very good. In fact, during these times, the MRI scans were so similar-looking that he could not tell them apart. These studies do not prove that gambling is as addictive as using cocaine, but they do suggest that both activities appear to affect the brain circuitry in a remarkably similar fashion.

Although this field of research is still in its infancy, Dr. Breiter and others have shown that similar results occur when people eat chocolate, view arousing nude pictures, or even play video games. All of these activities prompt the brain to release a variety of chemicals or neurotransmitters, including dopamine and endogenous opiates, which ultimately make us feel good. This phenomenon has led some scientists to observe that the brain is, essentially, a "giant pharmaceutical factory that manufactures powerful, mind-altering chemicals." Over time, many of us find ourselves craving the activities that trigger these chemical releases. In order to get a fix, we feel driven to eat chocolate constantly or bet $1,000 on a Yankees game again and again and again. Indeed, scientists now believe that there may be a whole range of activities that can, over time, change the chemistry of the some people's brains and create internal chemical dependencies. One addict's craving for gambling or eating chocolate may be physiologically every bit as real as another's craving for heroin or nicotine.

Of course, from time to time, we all gamble, or get drunk, or eat too much chocolate, but what scientists still don't know is why certain people become addicted to these behaviors. According to Dr. Alan Marlatt, who runs the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington, most addicts are essentially looking for a way to "self-medicate." "It is rare to find an addict who is feeling good and just wants to feel a bit better or more euphoric," Dr. Marlatt told me. "Far more often, addicts are trying to escape a low of depression or anxiety." Many clinicians also believe that addicts are looking to exert control over their lives. Craig Nakken, an author and addiction specialist, argues that when happiness eludes us - and we fall into despair - some of us resort to addictive behaviors that temporarily get us high, change our moods, and offer us relief. The food addict might have a fight with his spouse and then consume several cartons of ice cream. For a moment, instead of feeling depressed and empty, the food addict feels both emotionally and physically full. Again, we all engage in such escapism from time to time, but with addicts these behaviors spiral out of control. True addicts get locked into a destructive cycle in which they come to depend on an activity or a substance for pleasure and comfort. Gradually, the addict's set of priorities - or "value hierarchy" - begins to change as the addiction itself becomes more important than other values like work, friends, or family. Eventually, even if addicts desperately want to quit, they find it very difficult to do so.

Dr. Nora Volkow, who is the director of the National Institute for Drug Abuse, says that there are two things that define addiction - whether a person can bring himself or herself to quit and how well he or she functions in society. For example, you couldn't say that Bill Gates is "addicted" to making money or being famous because his desire for these things doesn't appear to debilitate him as a CEO or as a figure in his family. "But if Bill Gates was compulsive about making money or getting fame at the cost of his integrity, his family, or his health - and he couldn't quit despite wanting to do so - that could be described as an addiction," Dr. Volkow told me.

In general, the notion that people can become addicted to a whole range of substances and activities is gaining credibility not just with clinicians and scientists, but with the public as well. Over the last several decades, there has been an emergence of numerous 12-step recovery groups including "Alcoholics Anonymous" (founded in 1935), "Narcotics Anonymous" (circa 1950), "Gamblers Anonymous" (1957), "Overeaters Anonymous" (1960), "Debtors Anonymous" (1968), "Sex Addicts Anonymous" (1977), "Clutterers Anonymous" (1989), "Shoplifters Anonymous" (1992), "On-Line Gamers Anonymous" (2002) and the list goes on.

As far as I know, there are no support groups that cater to any of the celebrity-obsessed niches that I explored. There is no "Attention Seekers Anonymous," or "Celebrity Sidekicks Anonymous," or "Diehard Fans Anonymous." This may seem like a silly notion, but is it? If people are getting hooked on the rush of shoplifting or playing video games, isn't it possible that others are getting high either by fawning over celebrities or, better yet, by joining their entourages and riding with them in their limos? Isn't it even more likely that a select few are getting high by receiving massive amounts of attention from hordes of cheering fans? Don't all of these activities offer at least a bit of euphoria and a certain degree of transcendence or escapism? So why couldn't they be addictive?

The final and perhaps most important issue to consider is availability. Many healthcare experts, including those at the National Institute of Health, believe that one of the biggest causes of alcoholism may be how readily available it is. Similarly, there is a growing belief that gambling addictions are on the rise, in large part, because of the spread of casinos. Craig Nakken notes, "The more available addictive objects and events are, the greater the number of people who form addictive relationships with them." So wouldn't all of this apply to fame? If cable television and reality TV has helped increase the availability of fame, and if fame itself is addictive, might this explain why so many people are pining for it? And couldn't the same logic apply to celebrity-watching? If celebrity tabloids and TV shows are so available, and perhaps even mildly addictive, might this not explain why we can never get enough of them? In the final analysis, could many of us be suffering from a widespread and insidious addiction that no one has ever bothered to diagnose?

Copyright © 2007 by Jake Halpern. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.