Are we addicted to information on the Internet?
According to new research published in the journal PNAS, the human brain really is hungry for information and this hunger can translate into unhealthy behaviours since we now have unlimited access to completely random information.
Did curiosity kill the cat?
Although curiosity didn’t kill the cat literally, this saying lets us understand that our current compulsion to continually seek information can also have negative effects.
As we greedily move through social networks or examine small, random items about nothing in particular, we may be feeding the equivalent of empty calories to our brain.
Two researchers from the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley (USA) found that searching for information accesses the same neural code as searching for money.
“For the brain, information is its own reward, regardless of whether it’s useful” says Ming Hsu, co-author of the paper.”Just as our brains like the empty calories from junk food, they may overestimate information that makes us feel good but may not be useful, which some may call idle curiosity.”
The paper tried to answer two questions: can we reconcile the economic and psychological points of view of curiosity or why do people seek information? And does curiosity look like inside the brain?
For this purpose, researchers began performing functional (fMRI) on a group of volunteers as they placed a game in which they had to evaluate a series of lotteries and then make a decision, and decide how much money they wanted to invest to discover more information about the odds of winning.
Some offered more valuable information, while others contained very little information. Most participants made logical choices, considering the economic value of information in each case, with a value referred to the amount of money that the information given could help them win the game.
But there’s a catch! When there was more at stake, participants curiosity about the information increased, even when that information was not useful for making gambling decisions.
Based on this observation, researchers thought that the players behaviour was probably explained by a combination of economic motivation and psychological impulses (stimulated by curiosity).They suspected that people seek information not only because it has value and can bring benefits, but also because we simply want to know, regardless of whether we intend to use the information or whether it is useful at all. At the heart of all is the emotion of anticipation, the two authors point out. “Anticipation serves to amplify how good or bad something looks, and the anticipation of a more pleasant reward makes the information seem even more valuable,” explains Hsu.
Information overload is like junk food
When the researchers analyzed the nuclear magnetic resonance scans, they saw that access to information during the game activated the striatum and the prefrontal cortex ventromedial, these are two regions involved in the brain’s reward circuitry.
These areas also respond to money, food and recreational drugs and produce dopamine, which is a hormone and chemical messenger that plays a key role in directing motivation.
Researchers also found that the brain appeared to use the same type of neuronal “code” when responding to amounts of money and information about the odds of winning the game.
"We were able to demonstrate, for the first time, the existence of a common neuronal code for information and money, which opens the door to a series of interesting questions about how people consume and sometimes over-consume information," says Hsu.
The fact that there is a common code for monetary value and information and that it activates brain regions that are involved in the reward cycle, could mean that people could actually become addicted to information. This could have implications as to why we over-consume information, for example, when we can't stop checking our mobile notifications.
"The way our brains respond to the anticipation of a pleasurable reward is an important reason why people are susceptible to click," Hsu says.
While, throughout the past, the human race eagerly searched for information to maximize the chances of survival, easy access to useless information can lead to overload.
Referencia: Common neural code for reward and information value. Kenji Kobayashi and Ming Hsu. PNAS June 25, 2019 116 (26) 13061-13066; first published June 11, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820145116 Edited by Terrence J. Sejnowski, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, and approved May 20, 2019
