“How Money Shakes Our Brain”, titre Vision. The weekly illustrated the cover of its Thursday, September 5 edition with a cross-section of a human head, with a brain whose different parts are stimulated by sometimes haunting words: “shopping”, “savings”, “investments”, “gambling”. These are precisely the brain mechanisms involved in financial decision-making that the Portuguese newspaper dissects in its pages, using neuroscience and psychology to support it.
“Nothing excites the brain more than money – even naked bodies or corpses don’t excite people to that extent,” notes Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience. As evidence, a Harvard University study found that financial gain produced a similar response to taking cocaine: “In both cases, the brain’s reward circuitry, which involves instinct, cognition, motivation and memory, was at play, as was the release of generous doses of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens [une région du cerveau riche en récepteurs à dopamine].”
Peaks of pleasure and lack of empathy
Sex, drugs, chocolate and therefore money, among other things, trigger the same mechanisms, which result in peaks of pleasure, euphoria. But money – “a privileged target of our projections since Antiquity, idolized by some, demonized by others”, precise Vision –, also influences our behavior to the extent that we possess it. This is in any case the conclusion, relayed by the weekly, of several studies conducted by the American social psychologist Paul Piff:
“As wealth increases, compassion and empathy decrease and feelings of entitlement and worth increase, with a tendency to prioritize self-interest.”
We finally learn that our relationship with money also depends on our personal experience, on the “event lottery” of which we are the fruit, “because our genetic heritage dictates part of our functioning”, explains Manuela Grazina, a neuroscientist at the University of Coimbra: “An imbalanced reward circuit, whether due to genetic vulnerability – which accounts for more than 40% of the development of addictions – or due to emotional failures that alter the prefrontal cortex, can be at the origin of an aberrant and uncontrolled relationship with money.”
[…] - Courrier international
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