We all crave information, chase it and perhaps consume too much of it — but why?
Information lights up the brain’s pleasure centres, releasing dopamine, just like money or food.
People crave information much like they crave food, whether healthy or junk, because it triggers a similar reward response.
This appetite for information may help explain why people repeatedly check their phones for fresh updates.
The brain releases dopamine in response to information, regardless of whether that information is useful
Dr Ming Hsu, study co-author, said:
“To the brain, information is its own reward, above and beyond whether it’s useful.
And just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful — what some may call idle curiosity.”
The researchers showed that the brain uses a common scale for information, just as it does for money, Dr Hsu explained:
“We were able to demonstrate for the first time the existence of a common neural code for information and money, which opens the door to a number of exciting questions about how people consume, and sometimes over-consume, information.”
Information is its own reward
For the study, people’s brains were scanned while they played a gambling game.
They were then allowed to pay for information about their odds of winning in each game.
The results showed that people generally overvalued information, especially when larger rewards were at stake.
When people became more curious, they overvalued information even more.
Dr Hsu said:
“Anticipation serves to amplify how good or bad something seems, and the anticipation of a more pleasurable reward makes the information appear even more valuable.”
Brain scans revealed that information activates the same reward-processing regions involved in responses to food, money and drugs, including the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
These reward areas are involved in producing the neurotransmitter dopamine, known popularly as a ‘pleasure chemical’.
Dr Hsu said:
“We can look into the brain and tell how much someone wants a piece of information, and then translate that brain activity into monetary amounts.
The way our brains respond to the anticipation of a pleasurable reward is an important reason why people are susceptible to clickbait.
Just like junk food, this might be a situation where previously adaptive mechanisms get exploited now that we have unprecedented access to novel curiosities.”
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Kobayashi & Hsu, 2019).
