What Our Brains Most Desire Is Rewards

We often hear that we live in an attention economy, where tech companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook present us with an overwhelming amount of irresistible information that steals our attention.

This is not wrong, but our understanding of how attention works is imprecise. In a new study, researchers from the University of Copenhagen show that our attention works surprisingly well. And that it enables us to achieve exactly what our brains most desire—rewards.