Category: Hjerne

Informasjon er sin egen belønning — også for aper:

[…] a new study suggests that the same neurons that process the primitive physical rewards of food and water also signal the more abstract mental rewards of information.

[…]

Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka trained two thirsty rhesus monkeys to choose between two targets on a screen with a flick of their eyes; in return, they randomly received either a large drink or a small one after a few seconds. Their choice of target didn’t affect which drink they received, but it did affect whether they got prior information about the size of their reward. One target brought up another symbol that told them how much water they would get, while the other brought up a random symbol.

After a few days of training, the monkeys almost always looked at the target that would give them advance intel, even though it never actually affected how much water they were given. They wanted knowledge for its own sake. What’s more, even though the gap between picking a target and sipping some water was very small, the monkeys still wanted to know what was in store for them mere seconds later. To them, ignorance is far from bliss.

Not Exactly Rocket Science, via The Frontal Cortex

For noen uker siden lot jeg meg fascinere av dette TED-foredraget av Dan Ariely om hvilken rasjonell kontroll vi har over våre egne avgjørelser …

… men først i dag har jeg fått med meg at Ariely også blogger, i forbindelse med utgivelsen av boka Predictably Irrational. Der fant jeg blant annet ut hva en indonesisk ærlighetskafé er, og hvorfor Ariely tror de kan komme til å virke mot sin hensikt. Money quote fra bloggen:

Before the financial crisis of 2008, it was rather difficult to convince people that we all might have irrational tendencies.