Infinite Novelty Encourages Addiction to Smartphones

For what reason are a huge number of individuals across the globe continually stuck to their telephone screens? Scientists from the College of Copenhagen accept they have found out. They recommend that the foundation of our advanced interruptions might lie in our own natural craving for curiosity joined effortlessly with which innovation conveys it.

In their review, researchers contend that our hankering for curiosity is a principal part of human brain science.

“When we get this inner urge to check our email or the latest notifications on Facebook, it is not because we are overwhelmed by information; often, we are not even engaging with our mobile phone when the urge comes,” says Jelle Bruineberg, a philosopher at the University of Copenhagen, in a university release. “But the action of checking our phone affords us easy access to a very satisfying reward: a piece of novel information. This craving for novelty is, according to cognitive neuroscience, a basic aspect of the way our minds work.”

This longing for oddity, as per mental neuroscience, is well established in our psyches.

“Digital technologies provide us with the means to achieve this reward with hardly any effort. We only need to move a couple of fingers around on our phone,” explains Bruineberg.

“If I were in a library, which also contains vast amounts of information, it would not make sense for me to develop a checking habit with respect to a particular book. It would be too much of a hassle, but moreover the information in a book is static, it does not suddenly change in the way that information in the digital realm changes. It is the combination of effortless access and changing content, that makes us so susceptible to develop ‘checking habits.”

Anyway, what’s the reason for our computerized interruptions?

While it’s broadly acknowledged that the side effects of advanced innovation use incorporate interruption and trouble zeroing in on significant issues, Bruineberg challenges the predominant account.

“The current debate on the attention economy leans heavily on a particular way of conceiving of the interplay between attention and information,” notes Bruineberg. “The assumption is that there was a time before the advent of digital technology when information was scarce, and we were thus able to control our attention as we wanted. Now we live in times of information-abundance, and therefore controlling our attention has become more difficult. Following this idea, if only we were exposed to less information, the problem would be solved. But nothing suggests that controlling one’s attention has ever been easy.”

Since the beginning of time, different strict networks have stressed reflective and insightful practices to assist people with overseeing their consideration and beat ordinary interruptions. As opposed to presenting interruption, computerized innovations might offer unique and more unavoidable approaches to being occupied. Bruineberg suggests that there’s a significant confuse between how our psyches work and the design of present day computerized innovations.

“What it boils down to is that we – and our minds – are not equipped to deal with environments that allow for frictionless engagement and task-switching, practically infinite amounts of easily available novelty and rewards. And the only way to counter this development is to heavily constrain our digital environments,” concludes Bruineberg. “For example, receiving emails only twice a day guarantees that there is no novelty to be found in your inbox in between those moments. Fifty years from now, we probably look back in horror at how complex and unconstrained our current digital environments are.”