Finally, now we know our addiction to checking our smartphones every now and then.
According to a new study, this weird habit of checking our smartphones every second is related to our brain’s reward system, i.e. new information is similar to money or food in our brain’s reward system, hence we tend to check out phones even when we don’t expect any important message.
The study demonstrates that our brain converts the information received into the same common scale as it does with money according to the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, TT reports.
Researches have scanned brains of people while they played a gambling game and each of the participants was offered lotteries and asked to decide how much where they willing to pay to find out their chances of winning.
Well in few cases with the lotteries, the information was valuable, but in others, the information wasn’t worth much, such as when little was at stake.
It was noted that participants acquired information based not only on its actual benefit but also on the anticipation of its benefit, whether or not it was useful.