13 ms·

Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain

478 points by EndXA 7y ago

newswriter99 7y ago
TL;DR clickbait is addictive. “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.” THAT is the point of the article. Crap information is addictive. I knew there was some sort of angle to this.
- jackstraw14 7y ago
  Are you saying you think their angle was to reach a conclusion that sugary information is addictive? It sounded like that was the starting point. What's the issue?
  - newswriter99 7y ago
    They didn't specify what kind of information in the header. So you could either assume ALL information is like junkfood and drugs, or you could assume people are filling up on information and becoming more intelligent (which I assume NO ONE assumed) or make any number of assumptions. Case in point: the headline is too ambiguous.
sago 7y ago
For all but the last instant of our cultural evolution, humans have been information starved. In one generation we have become a culture that has instant access to unbounded quantities‡. In the same way, over the last century or so, we became a species with ample access to calories‡. With foods containing the evolutionary markers of high calorific content (i.e. sugars, carbs and fats) being the cheapest. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that we are similarly primed to overindulge in both. Nor that we lack the innate intuition to determine quality. I very much expect the nascent 'tech detox' movement to develop into a broader healthy thinking movement. --- ‡ #NotAllHumans, obviously.
- hi5eyes 7y ago
  also compounding this abundance are the ways social media/entertainment (games) basically takes the model of gambling and juices it to insane levels “diseases of abundance”
- pier25 7y ago
  > humans have been information starved I'm not sure starved is the right metaphor. When saying we were "information starved" it implies we actually needed more information, like food, when in fact the reason the brain pays so much attention to new stuff is probably because the signal to noise ratio was much higher for millions of years than it is these days.
  - naasking 7y ago
    > When saying we were "information starved" it implies we actually needed more information, like food We arguably did need more, like the locations to find food, when to plant food, how to deal with drought or pests, how to avoid and defend from predators, etc. Information is the key to all of our needs.
    - pier25 7y ago
      Hmm good point. Which makes me think: will we ever have enough?
    - mrob 7y ago
      See all the examples of explorers dying in places with ample food because they didn't know how to access it. Scott Alexander recently reviewed a book covering this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret... Information was critical for survival, so it's no surprise we seek it out.
      - naasking 7y ago
        Yes, but your link makes a good case that our cognitive abilities aren't perfect at this, nor did they necessarily evolve to do this. After all, plenty of other animals meet their needs perfectly fine without our large brains. Some have thus argued that our cognitive abilities actually evolved to deal with understanding the minds of other humans, to predict defectors and establish complex social systems that encourage cooperation and enhance collective survival. Our ability to cooperate provides a huge adaptive advantage, and so our innate biases supposedly make more sense in this context. This makes social media doubly dangerous, since not only is information valuable, but information about what other people are talking about, thinking, etc. is even more important to us.
PaulHoule 7y ago
In terms of neural networks that doesn't seem so strange. Neural networks can "overfit" and behave like a hash table instead of generalizing. One method of "regularization" is putting in a score that represents network complexity, information content, etc. and then adding it against the reward function.
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  So, what does that mean in terms of a user manual for human brains? We should discount low information dense sources ? or sources that are a long way off in graph terms?
  - mromanuk 7y ago
    Well, sugary drinks/other crap, healthy food and food in general, has a label with their nutritional facts. Maybe we will benefit from a a similar label next to every piece of info we are going to consume. “This newspaper is high in doubtful info and low in facts” probably a third party should label all the content
    - PaulHoule 7y ago
      From an information theory viewpoint, information means something in particular. For instance a black hole event horizon has the highest area information density in the universe but it like a frame of television static. In particular, once you are exposed to information it ceases to be information anymore. I think the behavior of "scanning" where you reload the front page of Hacker News or Google News or look at the newspaper over and over again hoping to get something new is particularly pernicious. You are exposing your brain to "information" in once sense but not real information in the sense of learning. Contrast a compulsive reading habit, where you are getting new information that you need to incorporate into long term memory as opposed to a compulsive video game habit for something like League of Legends or Advance Wars where you are recombining the same elements over and over again. I found that switching from the first to the second helped me feel less anxious, but I still read plenty about topics like 1970-era mainframe transaction processing or whatever I am into.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
edoo 7y ago
This can easily be channeled into a positive. If you are consuming information that has value I don't see the problem. I binge a little on engineering videos each week that add to my personal and professional life. I love absorbing new information. It is a far cry from going down youtube holes of reality tv highlights, celebrity news, or other modes of cultural decay.
- VBprogrammer 7y ago
  Honestly, sometimes I worry that watching engineering videos online is worse than the vacuous shit that normal people watch. I go through phases, things like aircraft, off grid living, hydropower, welding, CNC, machining, woodworking, electronics, gardening, farming, hydroponics. Few of those are relevant to my day job or even my current living arrangements. But when I get really interested in a subject I'll devour every shred of information I can find on it. The problem is, I doubt I'd get distracted in the middle of the working day thinking about Love Island, not so for the more "useful" things I've read and watched.
  - edoo 7y ago
    I was always interested in electrical engineering and after a couple years of watching stuff on youtube and trying it out myself, all from a leisure time perspective, it turned out I became qualified enough to do it professionally. I've been doing firmware forever and now I design the gadgets too. It has been very valuable.
    - PascLeRasc 7y ago
      What EE channels do you like?
      - HNLurker2 7y ago
        Eevblog is the gold standard for us
        7y ago
EndXA 7y ago
The original study can be found here: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/06/10/1820145116 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/06/10/1820145116 Abstract: > Adaptive information seeking is critical for goal-directed behavior. Growing evidence suggests the importance of intrinsic motives such as curiosity or need for novelty, mediated through dopaminergic valuation systems, in driving information-seeking behavior. However, valuing information for its own sake can be highly suboptimal when agents need to evaluate instrumental benefit of information in a forward-looking manner. Here we show that information-seeking behavior in humans is driven by subjective value that is shaped by both instrumental and noninstrumental motives, and that this subjective value of information (SVOI) shares a common neural code with more basic reward value. Specifically, using a task where subjects could purchase information to reduce uncertainty about outcomes of a monetary lottery, we found information purchase decisions could be captured by a computational model of SVOI incorporating utility of anticipation, a form of noninstrumental motive for information seeking, in addition to instrumental benefits. Neurally, trial-by-trial variation in SVOI was correlated with activity in striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Furthermore, cross-categorical decoding revealed that, within these regions, SVOI and expected utility of lotteries were represented using a common code. These findings provide support for the common currency hypothesis and shed insight on neurocognitive mechanisms underlying information-seeking behavior.
jcims 7y ago
Interesting to see this today. Yesterday I was listening to Duncan Trussel on Joe Rogan’s podcast and he was making this exact point. I imagine the information ‘food pyramid’ will evole over time as well.
oytis 7y ago
For those who want more snacks and drugs, here's the preprint of the actual article: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/17/324665.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/17/324665.full...
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  tl;dr: I think the study's idea of 'baseline' behavior relies on a payout-maximizing model we know is incorrect. Thanks, I'm well past the point of believing PR office summaries of studies on these topics. And sure enough, it looks to me like this is being oversold and also has some concerning gaps. Anyone want to help me understand that? Press release: “To the brain, information is its own reward, above and beyond whether it’s useful” Article: We observed that subjects’ information acquisition behavior was indeed largely driven by instrumental benefit... While we found no evidence for simplistic constant utility bonus, the utility of anticipation improved behavioral modeling. Which is to say, subjects specifically did not place an inherent value on information independent of its utility. Rather, they adjusted its value based on its utility in a way which did not perfectly maximize payout. More broadly and importantly, I think this is a worthwhile study, but I'm worried it's propagating a known behavior up through extra layers and calling it a new result. It's well established that people playing games of chance don't behave as perfect payout-maximizers, and specifically that they appear to be loss-averse and ambiguity-averse (e.g. Ellsberg's paradox). They also appear to place nonlinear value on the utility of money, changing their choices when all game outcomes are scaled with the same expected utility (Allais paradox). Given all of that, we can say that a player's desired outcome in such a game is not simply maximizing expected payout. As such, "perfectly rational" behavior at the information-buying step is not the decision which maximizes payout, but the one which maximizes their performance under their chosen utility function. But the study works from the assumption that "Under standard economic accounts, agents accept the lottery if its EU is higher than the utility of status quo u(0), and reject otherwise (Fig. 2a). Furthermore, they purchase the information if its cost is lower than VOI and forgo if higher". A host of studies show that this is not how people actually play lotteries. As a result, the study concludes that anticipation utility is acting at the information-buying step, while ignoring the possibility of strictly-rational purchasing under an alternate utility function. This could have been easily tested with a control in which players were asked to play the variable-outcome lotteries with perfect information, to establish baseline play against which to compare information-buying behavior. I'm still interested in the game results and the MRI data, but the press release tells us this result "could only be explained by a model that captured both economic and psychological motives". I'm not ready to accept that when the control is purely theoretical and based on a model we already know doesn't work.
Bartweiss 7y ago
Is it just me, or is "money" the odd one out here? Snacks and drugs both have direct, obvious 'value' to the body - food is about the simplest evolutionary case imaginable, and a host of animals will get drunk given the chance. And it's easy to make a case for 'information' as something any reinforcement learner will value and seek out, since it's essentially a prerequisite for all other learning and decision-making. Money, though, is exclusively a proxy for some other future benefit, and lots of other examples imply we haven't made it into a strong first-order feedback loop. Money v happiness studies both show weak happiness benefits from money (once you're not in dire need), and find that "how you spend it" strongly mediates the effects. Slot machine design is devoted to the idea of intermittent reinforcement and works very hard to create non-monetary, directly limbic rewards to keep players engaged. Given all that, "food, drugs, and info" actually sounds like a much more natural grouping to me than "food, drugs, and money". I don't know of any research here, though. Could you take a well-known study like prisoner's dilemma or the ultimatum game and get different results with non-monetary rewards, or prime people by discussing certain things they could do with the money?
- soVeryTired 7y ago
  One could think of money as a proxy for power and prestige. I think for social animals "Food, Drugs, Status" is a pretty decent list of priorities. Honestly, drugs looks like the odd one out there.
  - mbrock 7y ago
    I mean it’s also the only way to actually get food and drugs
    - dillonmckay 7y ago
      What? Hunting? Foraging? Peyote? Mushrooms? Willow bark?
      - dmix 7y ago
        I'm sure the environmental folks would love it if even a small percentage of the human population started doing that on a regular basis instead of relying on agriculture and industry.
danr4 7y ago
I consider my information addiction as one of the top 2 personal problems that are holding me back in my life. The only thing that works for me every once in a while is going cold turkey and blocking off as many websites as I can in my hosts file. I'm surprised there isn't a serious accessible product that helps people manage this addiction, because unlike drugs you can't realistically not use the internet ever again and nowadays it's SO easy to go down the rabbit hole even from innocent and serious sites. Every once in a while I humor myself with a building such a product, but I really don't know what features would work. Any suggestions?
- xchaotic 7y ago
  How would you decide what to block? Wikipedia or Stack Overflow can be extremely useful but you can waste time there as easily as on Facebook, Twitter or Hacker News.
  - ketzo 7y ago
    Feeds. Gotta block feeds out of your life. The never-ending treadmill of new information is what's really problematic, at least for me.
    - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
      I would have to agree. Overeating, overfeeding.... They share a lot of similarities.
    - asdff 7y ago
      Ironically feeds made me spend way less time on the internet. Instead of jumping around half a dozen different sites and dealing with their ass engagement-focused ux, I just skim their RSS feeds once at the end of the day. ~150-200 new articles a day and I scroll and skim through them in about 20 mins. Maybe I'll read 2-5 particularly interesting articles in depth, but even from what I'd call great websites a lot of the content is just noise and not worth the time spent to read. That really becomes apparent when you have a pretty barebones, super focused and condensed list.
EGreg 7y ago
“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” - Sherlock Holmes
- Cpoll 7y ago
  Arthur Conan Doyle was no neuroscientist. Useless facts don't elbow out the useful ones, except perhaps in the time taken to acquire them.
  - EGreg 7y ago
    Yes, it has since been “disproven”. But not all the way. I bet that spending all your time memorizing useless trivia will take away resources — at least in terms of time and opportunity — from, say, learning a language or a scientific discipline. Opportunity cost is a thing! And I think that’s true on the level of memory also.
EGreg 7y ago
Have you ever noticed how some people crave the resolution of simple lack of relevant information? You can say “Hey, I was goin to tell you... ah nevermind” and they will pester you, “no, tell me!” I have also found there is also a difference between male and female psychology. Women are much more interested to know the details of something emotionally salient that you’ve indicated you care about. Men let it go and seem to focus more intently on abstract things that may have wide applicability.
maitredusoi 7y ago
Isn't it the over way around ? Snacks, money, and drugs is like information to the brain ? ;) Perhaps everthing is just info, it is just that we are used to old patterns of seeing things...
superkuh 7y ago
Is everyone just going to ignore that the "information" they're talking about is information about the odds during gambling for money? That obviously makes this headline untrue. Gambling for money and learning the rules of gambling is not general information. This is not applicable to click-bait.
nurettin 7y ago
Reminds me of the hippocampus size study from 2006 for people who do repetitive work (bus driving) and people who have to analyze roads for best paths for a living (taxi drivers) in London https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17024677 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17024677 And from a personal anecdote, learning something new doesn't always feel like a drug or good food. News has always something new and it doesn't feel that great to consume. Learning something new that is applicable feels empowering, sometimes almost to the point of excitement and joy.
misiti3780 7y ago
The distractions smart phones are causing in our population is serious and scary. I like information everyone as much as the next person, but whenever I am checking my phone I try to remind myself of Robert Green's concept of "alive time" vs "dead-time" >"He told me, Ryan while people wait for the right moment, there are two types of time: Dead time—where they are passive and biding and Alive time—where they are learning and acting and leveraging every second towards their intended future. Which will this be for you?"[1] Social media is mostly dead time (I would say all dead time, but someone will probably give me shit about it), as is reading the short form versions of the news, TMZ, skimming an article instead of reading the whole thing, etc. If you spend 30 minutes a day studying a new language you can achieve amazing results in less than a year. Instead of wasting time on facebook, bring a kindle and read about something interesting. Compound growth is very real, and more people should take advantage of it. >"Compound growth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well, and it is magic. A small productivity gain, compounded over 50 years, is worth a lot. So it’s worth figuring out how to optimize productivity. If you get 10% more done and 1% better every day compared to someone else, the compounded difference is massive. " [2] >"You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode’s office and said, How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does? He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years. I simply slunk out of the office! What Bode was saying was this: Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works 10% more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode’s remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done."[3] End of rant. [1] https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2014/09/alive-time-vs-dead-time/ https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2014/09/alive-time-v... [2] https://blog.samaltman.com/productivity https://blog.samaltman.com/productivity [3] https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition
lone_haxx0r 7y ago
I, for one, don't care about my phone. I routinely forget where I put it. I use it a total of ~15 minutes a day. My desktop computer, on the other hand, I check hacker news every 5 minutes. Even if I know there's nothing of interest or I've already read all the comments about things I care about, I check just in case.
- quantisan 7y ago
  this site has been useful for me to stop checking HN regularly. It keeps track of all Top-X threads per day. So I can check it on the weekend or whenever and see if I missed anything important. http://hckrnews.com http://hckrnews.com
  - techslave 7y ago
    infinite scroll! a. no thanks! b. heroin for the information addict
- xtat 7y ago
  same! i more or less only touch my phone- vastly inferior ux- when i have to or if im actually mobile
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  Wondering if you actually track or can see how long you use your phone? Even when I barely use my phone. Just because of doing a web search, maps, a bit of data tracking, analytics for phone usage always adds ups to close to 30 min.
winter_blue 7y ago
An aside: we had a pretty interesting discussion about how to remedy scatter brain and information overload (back in Dec 2014): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8710006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8710006 Great comments in that thread.
hsnewman 7y ago
I find this informing!
buboard 7y ago
Ok this fMRI study is showing something that is not quite unexpected. rewarding behaviour is likely to be mediated by reward pathways, and the authors are careful not to address digital information overload/addiction directly because they did not study that. This finding is expected and thus not very informative (pun intented) . Also the title shouldn't just say "information", but curiosity instead. The participants weren't randomly fed information mindlessly, but were actively seeking actionable information from a stream. That's not quite like how modern media does it - in fact the 99% of digital media consumption is non-goal driven. This may be applicable however to goal-directed information seeking, like search results, dating sites, financial news feeds.
funkjunky 7y ago
Why do you think I keep coming back here?

478 points by EndXA 7y ago

TL;DR clickbait is addictive. “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.” THAT is the point of the article. Crap information is addictive. I knew there was some sort of angle to this.

jackstraw14 7y ago
Are you saying you think their angle was to reach a conclusion that sugary information is addictive? It sounded like that was the starting point. What's the issue?
- newswriter99 7y ago
  They didn't specify what kind of information in the header. So you could either assume ALL information is like junkfood and drugs, or you could assume people are filling up on information and becoming more intelligent (which I assume NO ONE assumed) or make any number of assumptions. Case in point: the headline is too ambiguous.

sago 7y ago

For all but the last instant of our cultural evolution, humans have been information starved. In one generation we have become a culture that has instant access to unbounded quantities‡. In the same way, over the last century or so, we became a species with ample access to calories‡. With foods containing the evolutionary markers of high calorific content (i.e. sugars, carbs and fats) being the cheapest. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that we are similarly primed to overindulge in both. Nor that we lack the innate intuition to determine quality. I very much expect the nascent 'tech detox' movement to develop into a broader healthy thinking movement. --- ‡ #NotAllHumans, obviously.

hi5eyes 7y ago
also compounding this abundance are the ways social media/entertainment (games) basically takes the model of gambling and juices it to insane levels “diseases of abundance”
pier25 7y ago
> humans have been information starved I'm not sure starved is the right metaphor. When saying we were "information starved" it implies we actually needed more information, like food, when in fact the reason the brain pays so much attention to new stuff is probably because the signal to noise ratio was much higher for millions of years than it is these days.
- naasking 7y ago
  > When saying we were "information starved" it implies we actually needed more information, like food We arguably did need more, like the locations to find food, when to plant food, how to deal with drought or pests, how to avoid and defend from predators, etc. Information is the key to all of our needs.
  - pier25 7y ago
    Hmm good point. Which makes me think: will we ever have enough?
  - mrob 7y ago
    See all the examples of explorers dying in places with ample food because they didn't know how to access it. Scott Alexander recently reviewed a book covering this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret... Information was critical for survival, so it's no surprise we seek it out.
    - naasking 7y ago
      Yes, but your link makes a good case that our cognitive abilities aren't perfect at this, nor did they necessarily evolve to do this. After all, plenty of other animals meet their needs perfectly fine without our large brains. Some have thus argued that our cognitive abilities actually evolved to deal with understanding the minds of other humans, to predict defectors and establish complex social systems that encourage cooperation and enhance collective survival. Our ability to cooperate provides a huge adaptive advantage, and so our innate biases supposedly make more sense in this context. This makes social media doubly dangerous, since not only is information valuable, but information about what other people are talking about, thinking, etc. is even more important to us.

PaulHoule 7y ago

In terms of neural networks that doesn't seem so strange. Neural networks can "overfit" and behave like a hash table instead of generalizing. One method of "regularization" is putting in a score that represents network complexity, information content, etc. and then adding it against the reward function.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago
So, what does that mean in terms of a user manual for human brains? We should discount low information dense sources ? or sources that are a long way off in graph terms?
- mromanuk 7y ago
  Well, sugary drinks/other crap, healthy food and food in general, has a label with their nutritional facts. Maybe we will benefit from a a similar label next to every piece of info we are going to consume. “This newspaper is high in doubtful info and low in facts” probably a third party should label all the content
  - PaulHoule 7y ago
    From an information theory viewpoint, information means something in particular. For instance a black hole event horizon has the highest area information density in the universe but it like a frame of television static. In particular, once you are exposed to information it ceases to be information anymore. I think the behavior of "scanning" where you reload the front page of Hacker News or Google News or look at the newspaper over and over again hoping to get something new is particularly pernicious. You are exposing your brain to "information" in once sense but not real information in the sense of learning. Contrast a compulsive reading habit, where you are getting new information that you need to incorporate into long term memory as opposed to a compulsive video game habit for something like League of Legends or Advance Wars where you are recombining the same elements over and over again. I found that switching from the first to the second helped me feel less anxious, but I still read plenty about topics like 1970-era mainframe transaction processing or whatever I am into.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

edoo 7y ago

This can easily be channeled into a positive. If you are consuming information that has value I don't see the problem. I binge a little on engineering videos each week that add to my personal and professional life. I love absorbing new information. It is a far cry from going down youtube holes of reality tv highlights, celebrity news, or other modes of cultural decay.

VBprogrammer 7y ago
Honestly, sometimes I worry that watching engineering videos online is worse than the vacuous shit that normal people watch. I go through phases, things like aircraft, off grid living, hydropower, welding, CNC, machining, woodworking, electronics, gardening, farming, hydroponics. Few of those are relevant to my day job or even my current living arrangements. But when I get really interested in a subject I'll devour every shred of information I can find on it. The problem is, I doubt I'd get distracted in the middle of the working day thinking about Love Island, not so for the more "useful" things I've read and watched.
- edoo 7y ago
  I was always interested in electrical engineering and after a couple years of watching stuff on youtube and trying it out myself, all from a leisure time perspective, it turned out I became qualified enough to do it professionally. I've been doing firmware forever and now I design the gadgets too. It has been very valuable.
  - PascLeRasc 7y ago
    What EE channels do you like?
    - HNLurker2 7y ago
      Eevblog is the gold standard for us
      - 7y ago

EndXA 7y ago

The original study can be found here: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/06/10/1820145116 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/06/10/1820145116 Abstract: > Adaptive information seeking is critical for goal-directed behavior. Growing evidence suggests the importance of intrinsic motives such as curiosity or need for novelty, mediated through dopaminergic valuation systems, in driving information-seeking behavior. However, valuing information for its own sake can be highly suboptimal when agents need to evaluate instrumental benefit of information in a forward-looking manner. Here we show that information-seeking behavior in humans is driven by subjective value that is shaped by both instrumental and noninstrumental motives, and that this subjective value of information (SVOI) shares a common neural code with more basic reward value. Specifically, using a task where subjects could purchase information to reduce uncertainty about outcomes of a monetary lottery, we found information purchase decisions could be captured by a computational model of SVOI incorporating utility of anticipation, a form of noninstrumental motive for information seeking, in addition to instrumental benefits. Neurally, trial-by-trial variation in SVOI was correlated with activity in striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Furthermore, cross-categorical decoding revealed that, within these regions, SVOI and expected utility of lotteries were represented using a common code. These findings provide support for the common currency hypothesis and shed insight on neurocognitive mechanisms underlying information-seeking behavior.

jcims 7y ago

Interesting to see this today. Yesterday I was listening to Duncan Trussel on Joe Rogan’s podcast and he was making this exact point. I imagine the information ‘food pyramid’ will evole over time as well.

oytis 7y ago

For those who want more snacks and drugs, here's the preprint of the actual article: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/17/324665.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/17/324665.full...

Bartweiss 7y ago
tl;dr: I think the study's idea of 'baseline' behavior relies on a payout-maximizing model we know is incorrect. Thanks, I'm well past the point of believing PR office summaries of studies on these topics. And sure enough, it looks to me like this is being oversold and also has some concerning gaps. Anyone want to help me understand that? Press release: “To the brain, information is its own reward, above and beyond whether it’s useful” Article: We observed that subjects’ information acquisition behavior was indeed largely driven by instrumental benefit... While we found no evidence for simplistic constant utility bonus, the utility of anticipation improved behavioral modeling. Which is to say, subjects specifically did not place an inherent value on information independent of its utility. Rather, they adjusted its value based on its utility in a way which did not perfectly maximize payout. More broadly and importantly, I think this is a worthwhile study, but I'm worried it's propagating a known behavior up through extra layers and calling it a new result. It's well established that people playing games of chance don't behave as perfect payout-maximizers, and specifically that they appear to be loss-averse and ambiguity-averse (e.g. Ellsberg's paradox). They also appear to place nonlinear value on the utility of money, changing their choices when all game outcomes are scaled with the same expected utility (Allais paradox). Given all of that, we can say that a player's desired outcome in such a game is not simply maximizing expected payout. As such, "perfectly rational" behavior at the information-buying step is not the decision which maximizes payout, but the one which maximizes their performance under their chosen utility function. But the study works from the assumption that "Under standard economic accounts, agents accept the lottery if its EU is higher than the utility of status quo u(0), and reject otherwise (Fig. 2a). Furthermore, they purchase the information if its cost is lower than VOI and forgo if higher". A host of studies show that this is not how people actually play lotteries. As a result, the study concludes that anticipation utility is acting at the information-buying step, while ignoring the possibility of strictly-rational purchasing under an alternate utility function. This could have been easily tested with a control in which players were asked to play the variable-outcome lotteries with perfect information, to establish baseline play against which to compare information-buying behavior. I'm still interested in the game results and the MRI data, but the press release tells us this result "could only be explained by a model that captured both economic and psychological motives". I'm not ready to accept that when the control is purely theoretical and based on a model we already know doesn't work.

Bartweiss 7y ago

Is it just me, or is "money" the odd one out here? Snacks and drugs both have direct, obvious 'value' to the body - food is about the simplest evolutionary case imaginable, and a host of animals will get drunk given the chance. And it's easy to make a case for 'information' as something any reinforcement learner will value and seek out, since it's essentially a prerequisite for all other learning and decision-making. Money, though, is exclusively a proxy for some other future benefit, and lots of other examples imply we haven't made it into a strong first-order feedback loop. Money v happiness studies both show weak happiness benefits from money (once you're not in dire need), and find that "how you spend it" strongly mediates the effects. Slot machine design is devoted to the idea of intermittent reinforcement and works very hard to create non-monetary, directly limbic rewards to keep players engaged. Given all that, "food, drugs, and info" actually sounds like a much more natural grouping to me than "food, drugs, and money". I don't know of any research here, though. Could you take a well-known study like prisoner's dilemma or the ultimatum game and get different results with non-monetary rewards, or prime people by discussing certain things they could do with the money?

soVeryTired 7y ago
One could think of money as a proxy for power and prestige. I think for social animals "Food, Drugs, Status" is a pretty decent list of priorities. Honestly, drugs looks like the odd one out there.
- mbrock 7y ago
  I mean it’s also the only way to actually get food and drugs
  - dillonmckay 7y ago
    What? Hunting? Foraging? Peyote? Mushrooms? Willow bark?
    - dmix 7y ago
      I'm sure the environmental folks would love it if even a small percentage of the human population started doing that on a regular basis instead of relying on agriculture and industry.

danr4 7y ago

I consider my information addiction as one of the top 2 personal problems that are holding me back in my life. The only thing that works for me every once in a while is going cold turkey and blocking off as many websites as I can in my hosts file. I'm surprised there isn't a serious accessible product that helps people manage this addiction, because unlike drugs you can't realistically not use the internet ever again and nowadays it's SO easy to go down the rabbit hole even from innocent and serious sites. Every once in a while I humor myself with a building such a product, but I really don't know what features would work. Any suggestions?

xchaotic 7y ago
How would you decide what to block? Wikipedia or Stack Overflow can be extremely useful but you can waste time there as easily as on Facebook, Twitter or Hacker News.
- ketzo 7y ago
  Feeds. Gotta block feeds out of your life. The never-ending treadmill of new information is what's really problematic, at least for me.
  - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
    I would have to agree. Overeating, overfeeding.... They share a lot of similarities.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Ironically feeds made me spend way less time on the internet. Instead of jumping around half a dozen different sites and dealing with their ass engagement-focused ux, I just skim their RSS feeds once at the end of the day. ~150-200 new articles a day and I scroll and skim through them in about 20 mins. Maybe I'll read 2-5 particularly interesting articles in depth, but even from what I'd call great websites a lot of the content is just noise and not worth the time spent to read. That really becomes apparent when you have a pretty barebones, super focused and condensed list.

EGreg 7y ago

“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” - Sherlock Holmes

Cpoll 7y ago
Arthur Conan Doyle was no neuroscientist. Useless facts don't elbow out the useful ones, except perhaps in the time taken to acquire them.
- EGreg 7y ago
  Yes, it has since been “disproven”. But not all the way. I bet that spending all your time memorizing useless trivia will take away resources — at least in terms of time and opportunity — from, say, learning a language or a scientific discipline. Opportunity cost is a thing! And I think that’s true on the level of memory also.

EGreg 7y ago

Have you ever noticed how some people crave the resolution of simple lack of relevant information? You can say “Hey, I was goin to tell you... ah nevermind” and they will pester you, “no, tell me!” I have also found there is also a difference between male and female psychology. Women are much more interested to know the details of something emotionally salient that you’ve indicated you care about. Men let it go and seem to focus more intently on abstract things that may have wide applicability.

maitredusoi 7y ago

Isn't it the over way around ? Snacks, money, and drugs is like information to the brain ? ;) Perhaps everthing is just info, it is just that we are used to old patterns of seeing things...

superkuh 7y ago

Is everyone just going to ignore that the "information" they're talking about is information about the odds during gambling for money? That obviously makes this headline untrue. Gambling for money and learning the rules of gambling is not general information. This is not applicable to click-bait.

nurettin 7y ago

Reminds me of the hippocampus size study from 2006 for people who do repetitive work (bus driving) and people who have to analyze roads for best paths for a living (taxi drivers) in London https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17024677 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17024677 And from a personal anecdote, learning something new doesn't always feel like a drug or good food. News has always something new and it doesn't feel that great to consume. Learning something new that is applicable feels empowering, sometimes almost to the point of excitement and joy.

misiti3780 7y ago

The distractions smart phones are causing in our population is serious and scary. I like information everyone as much as the next person, but whenever I am checking my phone I try to remind myself of Robert Green's concept of "alive time" vs "dead-time" >"He told me, Ryan while people wait for the right moment, there are two types of time: Dead time—where they are passive and biding and Alive time—where they are learning and acting and leveraging every second towards their intended future. Which will this be for you?"[1] Social media is mostly dead time (I would say all dead time, but someone will probably give me shit about it), as is reading the short form versions of the news, TMZ, skimming an article instead of reading the whole thing, etc. If you spend 30 minutes a day studying a new language you can achieve amazing results in less than a year. Instead of wasting time on facebook, bring a kindle and read about something interesting. Compound growth is very real, and more people should take advantage of it. >"Compound growth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well, and it is magic. A small productivity gain, compounded over 50 years, is worth a lot. So it’s worth figuring out how to optimize productivity. If you get 10% more done and 1% better every day compared to someone else, the compounded difference is massive. " [2] >"You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode’s office and said, How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does? He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years. I simply slunk out of the office! What Bode was saying was this: Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works 10% more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode’s remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done."[3] End of rant. [1] https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2014/09/alive-time-vs-dead-time/ https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2014/09/alive-time-v... [2] https://blog.samaltman.com/productivity https://blog.samaltman.com/productivity [3] https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

lone_haxx0r 7y ago

I, for one, don't care about my phone. I routinely forget where I put it. I use it a total of ~15 minutes a day. My desktop computer, on the other hand, I check hacker news every 5 minutes. Even if I know there's nothing of interest or I've already read all the comments about things I care about, I check just in case.

quantisan 7y ago
this site has been useful for me to stop checking HN regularly. It keeps track of all Top-X threads per day. So I can check it on the weekend or whenever and see if I missed anything important. http://hckrnews.com http://hckrnews.com
- techslave 7y ago
  infinite scroll! a. no thanks! b. heroin for the information addict
xtat 7y ago
same! i more or less only touch my phone- vastly inferior ux- when i have to or if im actually mobile
skinnymuch 7y ago
Wondering if you actually track or can see how long you use your phone? Even when I barely use my phone. Just because of doing a web search, maps, a bit of data tracking, analytics for phone usage always adds ups to close to 30 min.

winter_blue 7y ago

An aside: we had a pretty interesting discussion about how to remedy scatter brain and information overload (back in Dec 2014): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8710006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8710006 Great comments in that thread.

hsnewman 7y ago

I find this informing!

buboard 7y ago

Ok this fMRI study is showing something that is not quite unexpected. rewarding behaviour is likely to be mediated by reward pathways, and the authors are careful not to address digital information overload/addiction directly because they did not study that. This finding is expected and thus not very informative (pun intented) . Also the title shouldn't just say "information", but curiosity instead. The participants weren't randomly fed information mindlessly, but were actively seeking actionable information from a stream. That's not quite like how modern media does it - in fact the 99% of digital media consumption is non-goal driven. This may be applicable however to goal-directed information seeking, like search results, dating sites, financial news feeds.

funkjunky 7y ago

Why do you think I keep coming back here?