The longest thing in the world is the three minutes waiting for instant noodles

　　When you are hungry, you can’t wait to tear open the packaging bag of instant noodles, pour boiling water, and then start the longest 3-minute wait in the world.
　　Nissin Foods, which invented instant noodles, once revealed a secret in an interview with a TV station. In fact, the company was able to make instant noodles for one minute a long time ago.
　　For instant noodles, if you want to soak for a short time, you only need to make the noodles thinner, so that the noodles are easy to soak, and you can eat them after pouring in water and scalding them. And not only Nissin, but also other instant noodle companies in the world have long discovered this fact.
　　But why haven’t companies started producing instant noodles that everyone can eat faster?
　　The answer lies in waiting. During the three-minute wait, you have to have an empty stomach and endure the aroma of instant noodles. You will become even hungrier when you are already hungry. In this case, the instant noodles you eat will feel extra special. tasty.
　　Hans Bright, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, believes that “when we are hungry, we spend a long time cooking a good meal for ourselves, and cooking itself constitutes a pleasurable stimulation process. But when we enjoy this When a meal is delicious, the phantasy of cooking may not be experienced at all. Therefore, it is the anticipation process that is most stimulated, not the final expectation realization.” In our brain, there is a system
　　called They are called “expectation circuits”, and they are widely distributed in various parts of the brain, just like the commercial office network dotted around the central area of ​​a big city. stand.
　　The nucleus accumbens becomes increasingly excited when we foresee financial gain. But once you actually make money, the anticipation cools down, creating a lukewarm sense of satisfaction. Compared with the previous popularity, this sense of satisfaction paled.
　　That is, the pleasure we anticipate is more intense than the pleasure we actually experience.
　　Scientists have also discovered this through experiments on animals: when the scientists gave the animals a sip of fruit juice, as expected, the dopamine content in the animals’ brains increased, because dopamine is a reward for the pleasure of drinking fruit juice.
　　But after giving the animal several times of drinking juice, a strange thing happened. The dopamine content in the animal’s brain rose before the action of drinking the juice, that is, as long as there were enough clues that could indicate that the action of drinking the juice would happen, such as When a sound or an image is heard, the dopamine content in the animal’s brain rises sharply.
　　In other words, dopamine levels rose whenever the animal received information predicting that something pleasurable was about to happen.
　　Merchants seem to have a deep understanding of the structure of the human brain, and the wait is so exciting that merchants continue to use our characteristics to increase product sales.
　　For example, if you buy the latest mobile phone that has just been released, you may have to wait a week or two to get the goods. During this time, you are immersed in the joy of imagining the latest mobile phone every day. The feeling you get when you actually hold your phone.