The Neuroeconomics Revolution
by ilene - February 10th, 2010 12:45 am
Fascinating article by Psy-Fi’s Tim. (My yellow highlighting.) – Ilene
The Neuroeconomics Revolution
Courtesy of Tim at The Psy-Fi Blog
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A recent development in economics sees the combining of neurology, psychology and economics in an attempt to reduce economic behaviour to brain function and to predict market behaviour from observable brain patterns. Its aim is to glue together a subject that can’t predict human behaviour from analysis of the brain with a subject that can’t predict human behaviour from analysis of people to a subject that can’t predict human behaviour from analysis of economic data.
Welcome to the Neuroeconomics Revolution.
The Busted Flushes of Psychology and Economics
Psychology spent a large part of the last century stuck in a behaviourist dead-end, carrying out endless experiments on animals in an attempt to explain all human behaviour in terms of externally observable responses to equally observable stimuli: think ringing bells causing salivating dogs or rising markets causing manic investors. The net result of this was that the subject ended up befuddled by mice running the wrong way around mazes and found itself generally regarded as the extreme paramilitary wing of the pigeon fanciers association.
Meanwhile economics, the study of how human financial systems operate, also proceeded on the basis that how humans actually behave was irrelevant and arrived at a set of explanations that defied both logic and the evidence of real markets. Yet even as economics has reluctantly faced up to the need to involve psychology in its models so psychology is beginning to recognise that understanding people requires a more detailed look at the way the brain actually works. Taken together we’re witnessing the creation of a new subject.
Neuroeconomics
Neuroeconomics is nothing more or less than the attempt to relate the now observable functioning of the brain, as provided by neuroscientific techniques, with the various models of economics. Advances in brain scanning techniques permit researchers to subject innocent participants to endless pointless questions while inspecting how their brains grapple with the problems. There is no escape.
As you might imagine, the marketeers of the world have leapt on this idea. Martin Lindstrom relates in Buyology how the inspection of people’s brains reveals what more…