This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Tally up all your regular spots, places you visit on a weekly basis,

like restaurants, markets, parks, and what do you get?

A new study says that most of us limit our hangouts to some 25 places.

So every time we adopt a new place somehow, we abandon another one.

And this is how we shape our routines.

Andrea Baro Kelly, a physicist at City University of London.

So we are actually boring at any point in time.

However, over the course of the time, we change the set of places we are boring in.

But Unkele and his team analysed the movements of nearly 40,000 people worldwide,

using mostly anonymized location data from the Sony Lifelog app.

And they found that regardless of age or gender or geographic location as users explored new places they

maintained a steady diet of about 25 regular haunts. I think this is really a

deep property of us as humans, of the way we balance this tension between exploration and

exploitation.

The researchers did see a link between how active study subjects were socially and the number of spots they frequented.

People who were more active had a slightly higher number of regular spots.

The scientists estimated social activity by phone calls, texts, and Facebook interactions, and that finding suggests

that our friends could ramp up our exploratory behavior. The results are in the journal

Nature Human Behavior. The researchers themselves admit that their lunch routine is in keeping with their discovery.

Every day we say we should try something else and then we say yeah maybe tomorrow.

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