Hello everyone and welcome to Curiosity Daily from Discovery. It's a wonderful place to get

smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Nate and I'm Callie. If you're dropping in for the first time welcome to curiosity where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind

Today you learn about the part of the brain that keeps us focused on our goals even when it would be better to quit, a massive discovery of lost wheat genes

that could help feed a crowded planet, and a new wearable technology that could

diagnose disease by monitoring your sweat.

Okay, no that sounds gross.

Fine.

People are always setting goals.

It's kind of our thing,

and many of us have set goals that we just can't quit,

even when it would be a good idea to change gears.

Oh, yeah, I've started projects that get out of hand, maybe the further along I got, the more I could see this goal was going to be way more expensive or complicated than I thought.

Yeah, no, I've actually seen you do this. Anyways, you know you should probably just give up, but you can't.

But once you get going toward a goal like that, it's hard to quit.

So that's called the sunk cost fallacy.

Right, yeah, I've heard about this.

I learned about in psychology class.

Basically, if you've already put a ton of time and effort or let's be honest,

money toward a goal, it feels like a waste to quit before you achieve it. Even if you can

clearly logically reasonably see that it is in your best interest to quit.

Exactly. So this is typically a theory in behavioral economics, which is basically the study of how a bunch of factors

come together to influence our economic decisions.

...