A study of the traces left by 50,000 cellphone users says that whether you are a homebody or a frequent flier, your movements are predictable - theoretically speaking.
"We are all in one way or another boring," says Albert-László Barabási at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University in Boston, who co-wrote the study. "Spontaneous individuals are largely absent from the population."
To reach the conclusion, Barabási and colleagues used three months' worth of data from a cellphone network to track the cellphone towers each person's phone connected to each hour of the day, revealing their approximate location, reports New Scientist.
After analysing, boffins concluded that humans' movements are theoretically predictable as much as 93 per cent of the time.
They found that most people stay close to home and, more intriguingly, that even the frequent travelers were no less predictable than the homebodies. Furthermore, they discovered that this phenomenon didn't merely stem from the workweek, the fact that so many of us spend Monday to Friday in the same office. Weekend movements were no more random.
The study has been published in Science.