The neurophysiology of gambling

If you read my previous post on the neurobiology of risk, you may recall that the ventral striatum regulates risk and rewards. In most people, thinking about winning money increases dopamine in the ventral striatum, and thinking about losing money decreases it. This is where gambling comes in.
This excellent post on the neuroscience of gambling [...]

Negotiating and Culture

Firstly, my thanks to Million Dollar Journey and their entry Confessions of a Car Salesman which discusses negotiating techniques used by used car salesman. Reading that blog got me thinking on the topic of negotiation.
Through my travels, I have often been fascinated by cultural attitudes towards negotiation.
In a number of places in the world, [...]

Addictions - Retail Therapy

We’ve discussed the ventral striatum in this blog before.  It’s a component of the brain involved in processing rewards in the brain.  When you do something that makes you feel good, it helps to release a positive neurotransmitter such as dopamine.
Scientists believe that this rewards mechanism served an evolutionary purpose in that it helped reward [...]

A Rose by Any Other Name

Part of the art of marketing is in repackaging goods and reselling them in hundreds of different configurations.  We pay more and more for things we could get cheaper in other forms. 
 
Through advertising, marketing and product placement, retailers and companies play an elaborate game of smoke and mirrors in order to convince us to [...]

Flattery Will Get You Everywhere

One of the most interesting facts about how products are sold, is that the products which can do you the most harm are often the most flattering to you in their ads.
 
Flattery used to belong to the domain of interpersonal relations.  You “buttered someone up” if you wanted something from them.  You flattered someone to [...]

Yoga for Financial Peace

Have trouble with controlling your shopping impulses?
As bizarre as it may sound, it just might be crazy enough to work. If we want to look at the background on it, we can compare financial health to physical health. Yoga has been cited as a beneficial action for weight loss and health maintenance. [...]

Obama, money, and the recency effect

Obama’s tactics this campaign season have mostly involved not addressing the rumors circulating the Internet and the country about his beliefs and background. But that’s changing (he recently put up a website to address them), and it’s a good move to increase his chances of winning the presidential race. This article discusses how it’s important [...]

The neurobiology of risk: the posterior cingulate cortex

The cingulate cortex sits on top of the corpus callosum, the thick cable that connects the two halves of the brain. It’s connected with the amygdala, which coordinates perceptions of feeling and emotion, and divided into the anterior and posterior parts. The anterior cingulate cortex has been implicated in effortful decision-making (Mulert et al., 2008, [...]

Investing: Can you take the pain?

On a day at the stock market like today we almost all feel the pain. As I write this the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the Dow) is down 130 points for the day and off 450 points in the last 4 trading days. So when the value of your mutual fund or stocks are moving [...]

The psychology of gambling

Gambling is a bad financial decision. Most of us know that it’s a game that–at least in regulated places such as casinos–you can only win if you happen to be lucky. The odds are always against you. So why do people love it? In essence, because our brains are programmed to.
Psychology has examined how gambling, [...]

On looking poor

Smart Spending recently discussed a Saving Advice post on how looking poor can benefit you. The comments are great reading; a lot of the readers have anecdotes on how some snobby salesperson missed out on a great commission by passing over a person who didn’t look like he had much money to spend. There are [...]

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Personal Neurofinance Blog by Ivan Widjaya is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.moneyandminds.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.moneyandminds.com.

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