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Neuroscience and your network connection

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The other day, I woke up to a room much sunnier than the one I usually see at 6 in the morning.

It was not, as my mind initially (hopefully, stupidly) supplied, a further sign of the coming of spring.

No, it was 8:19 a.m. I had slept through my alarm. And with a can’t-miss meeting at 9 and a 35-minute commute to contend with, the pressure was on. My heart jolted.

I rushed through a teeth-brushing, clean-clothes-finding morning routine and was shortly speed-walking down the sidewalk and muttering at my commuter app – which was taking precious more seconds than I had to load the time table for the next bus. I found myself shooting frantic looks over my shoulder to see if said bus was coming, my steps quickening and my heart pounding.

“Why stress?” you might ask. “A few minutes’ tardiness couldn’t have hurt.”

I’d like to believe you – but neuroscience tells a different story.

The just-launched Mobile World Congress edition of the Ericsson Mobility Report showcases this story via a recent study. The Ericsson ConsumerLab tested the reactions of 30 volunteers, aged 18-52, to delays in mobile content loading. Fitted with pulse meters, eye-tracking glasses and EEG electrode headsets to record brain activity, the participants were challenged to complete tasks in a set amount of time – and then served with a bevy of network delays, from just a few seconds’ delay in webpage loading to multiple video buffering events.

Among the impacts: your heart rate alone increases on average 38 percent with mobile delays in this kind of time-pressurized setting. And if you’re trying to watch a video and have already experienced some delays, just one pause can increase your stress levels an additional 15 percentage points.

Basically – experiencing mobile delays is about as stressful as watching a horror movie or solving a math problem.

The study also shows how network performance impacts a user’s perception of brands – specifically the Net Promoter Scores for the network provider and the content provider respectively. Medium delays – blame falls on the network provider. High delays – the user starts to point the finger at the content provider.

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Check out the study for more insights on how we respond to network performance, as well as additional data on mobile traffic worldwide (via updates to key Ericsson Mobility Report statistics and new network insights).

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