Listening to the Voices in Your Head

So, my nucleus accumbens and insula, according to this NY Times article here, are responsible for the glut on my Mastercard bill. Who knew?

Last year, after surveying shoppers’ passions, behavioral economists at Carnegie Mellon University developed what they call the Tightwad-Spendthrift scale.
But this kind of survey reveals only what shoppers choose to confess. To find out more, the economists teamed with psychologists at Stanford to turn an M.R.I. machine into a shopping mall. They gave each experimental subject $40 in cash and offered the chance to buy dozens of gadgets, appliances, books, DVDs and assorted tchotchkes. Lying inside the scanner, first you’d see a picture of a product. Next you’d see its price, which was about 75 percent below retail. Then you’d choose whether or not you’d like a chance to buy it. Afterward, the researchers randomly chose a couple of items from their mall, and if you had said yes to either one, you bought it; otherwise you went home with the cash. The good news, for behavioral science, was that the researchers saw telltale patterns, which they report in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Neuron.