
Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain - EndXA
http://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/how-information-is-like-snacks-money-and-drugs-to-your-brain/
======
danr4
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
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.

~~~
Zealotux
While Stack Overflow is great for solving issues, I still had to block the
"Hot Network Questions" suggestions from the sidebar because it was an almost
systematic distraction that would inevitably send me down a rabbit-hole of
unrelated questions.

Any system designed to solve the attention problem will have to be
opinionated, blocking specific websites, or at least parts of it, I guess it's
an interesting case study for machine learning.

~~~
mthoms
I did this as well and it definitely helped. For Stack Overflow I've also
removed the left sidebar entirely and upped the minimum width of the main
content (so code doesn't get cut off nearly as much).

Another helpful one was removing the "next page" links on Reddit (I use the
classic version). That way I can check on some things I'm interested in, but
not get carried away.

I'm considering doing the same for Hacker News.

------
EndXA
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.

------
Bartweiss
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
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
I mean it’s also the only way to actually get food and drugs

~~~
dillonmckay
What?

Hunting?

Foraging?

Peyote?

Mushrooms?

Willow bark?

~~~
dmix
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.

~~~
komali2
Lots of people do have gardens already

~~~
dmix
So they can have a couple tomatoes and bunches of arugula to last maybe a
month or two after their harvest time? Meanwhile 99% of the food they eat
still comes from agriculture.

There really is no real alternative to agriculture and food markets, besides
the things that are more of a hobby than a serious option.

~~~
komali2
You're not wrong, but this is how I learned about in-season vegetables. I can
keep my garden going year-round, but it took time and learning, so I'm not
suggesting it's possible for everyone (especially once you take geography into
account). It's hard work!

But even as a relatively staunch environmentalist, I didn't really "get" in-
season produce until I tried keeping a garden 365 days a year. Now it sticks,
and I have a much better idea when I walk into a grocery store of what veggies
are in season. I should know, because they reflect what I'm currently trying
(or know I can) grow in my garden for the given month.

Basically, the benefit isn't just that I'm buying less stuff from the grocery
store.

~~~
sokoloff
If I tallied up all we spend on our garden and divide the amount of produce we
get from it by that figure, it would make Whole Foods' prices look
ridiculously cheap...

~~~
komali2
And I pay a premium for eggs from a small farm where chickens are fed well and
allowed to wander.

No even whole foods is charging the correct price for goods when one takes
into account the environmental impact.

------
sago
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.

~~~
pier25
> _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
> 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.

~~~
mrob
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...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-
our-success/)

Information was critical for survival, so it's no surprise we seek it out.

~~~
naasking
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.

------
oytis
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...](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/17/324665.full.pdf)

~~~
gwern
Doesn't look like it differs much from the published version:
[https://www.gwern.net/docs/rl/2019-kobayashi.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/rl/2019-kobayashi.pdf)
(as usual...)

------
EGreg
_“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
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
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.

------
lone_haxx0r
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
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
infinite scroll!

a. no thanks!

b. heroin for the information addict

------
jcims
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.

------
superkuh
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.

------
EGreg
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.

------
buboard
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.

------
PaulHoule
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
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
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
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.

------
winter_blue
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.

------
nurettin
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.

------
maitredusoi
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...

------
newswriter99
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
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
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.

------
misiti3780
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-v...](https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2014/09/alive-time-vs-dead-
time/)

[2]
[https://blog.samaltman.com/productivity](https://blog.samaltman.com/productivity)

[3] [https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition](https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-
repetition)

------
funkjunky
Why do you think I keep coming back here?

------
hsnewman
I find this informing!

------
edoo
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.

~~~
Dajsvaro
Honest question.

Maybe I'm old, or maybe I'm not a visual or aural learner, but I don't get
much out of watching Youtube videos. Do you find them a better learning tool
than reading a well produced document or tutorial?

~~~
Liquix
For many in younger generations (including myself), watching a youtube video -
even a dry educational one - scratches an "I'm being entertained" itch,
perhaps born of being raised watching television. Something deeply rooted
adores fast-paced audiovisual stimuli. Reading a well written document does
not have the same effect. It's troubling.

