Mobiles to beat nicotine craving

By Jonathan Amos

Smokers desperate to give up cigarettes could soon resort to a small program on their mobile phone. It would throw up a series of flickering dots on the screen, which psychologists say seem to break some of the mental processes that drive the need for another nicotine fix.

The idea has been tested in the lab on a desktop computer in a controlled study on students.

But researcher Dr John May, from Sheffield University, UK, said it was something that could quite possibly find its way on to portable devices in the not too distant future.

The dots create what is termed “visual noise” and interfere with the pleasurable images the mind associates with the object of desire.

“They don’t stop the images but they do make them less vivid,” he said. —BBC

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