It's about Space, It's about Time, Neuroeconomics and the Brain Sublime

摘要

Imagine yourself lying on your back on a well-oiled high-tech sliding board, rather like the board of an auto mechanic who disappears under the front end of your car. You too will disappear head first into the narrow tunnel of the magnetic resonance imaging device-a brain scanner. Unlike a mechanic sliding under a car, however, you are tied with soft constraints around head and torso to minimize your movement and hold your head still while areas of your brain are scanned as you play an economic game. Based upon recent neuroeconomic studies, certain parts of the brain have been found to be more active in situations that involve calculation versus trust, or considerations of fairness, or problems of ambiguity versus risk, or other factors (for a review, see McCabe, 2008). Like previous studies in behavioral economics, neuroeconomic studies have established roles for both cognition and emotion in economic decision making. But the emphasis of most work thus far has been to discover their respective spatial locations in the human brain. We begin this essay by describing some examples of this work. We will also discuss some practical concerns suggesting that the findings of these studies, while an intuitive starting point, should be treated as provisional.