More than a month ago, I posted this article on human spending addiction “There Should Be A Pill To Make People Stop Spending” and tried to relate gambling and shopping with conditions of the brain. I am happy to note that more people are making that connection 
as this article from BBC suggests. According to the article, researchers have now identified a specific area in the brain that “wants the stuff” and another area that “doesn’t want to spend”; and have observed that the decision to buy or not to buy is a trade-off between the two.
This is good news for those with compulsive spending tendencies because with this kind of understanding, designing a anti-spending pill will become easier.
Here are some interesting excerpts from the article:
If the volunteer wanted the product, a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens lit up.
Then, when the price appeared, a high price activated a part called the insula, and deactivated other parts.
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They said that the study could reveal how credit cards ‘trick’ the brain into buying more.
They wrote: “This finding has implications for understanding behavioural anomalies, such as consumers’ growing tendency to overspend and under save when purchasing with credit cards rather than cash.”
I am a bit wary of this claim…I have always associated higher credit card spending to lack of self control (read discipline) and lack of common sense. But may be the lack of self control is because of the mind-games our brain plays with us. That being said, it would be nice if they identify the brain area that affects common sense :).
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He said: “Human financial behaviour is often seemingly irrational, a fact that provides employment for advertisers, casino workers, insurance salesmen, and economists.”
He said that it might be possible to understand more about compulsive shoppers and gamblers by spotting problems in the brain areas revealed by the scans.
Btw, I also see a very obvious unwanted consequence of this research. Such a finding will be immediately exploited by the advertisers, casino workers, insurance salesmen, and economists (and credit card companies…if we go along with what they are saying) and a whole lot of people are going to end up spending a lot more. Advertisers will start targeting the “nucleus accumbens” of your brain to make you spend more and personal finance bloggers will keep appealing to your “insula” to make you spend less. Man that sounds like fun.
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Could you imagine how valuable the data would be on this type of testing? Marketers would drool over the ability to see how product/service tweaks caused a person to change from “I want this” to “I need this.”
I know I would.
LOL……… oh I’m loving it
That would be so cool
Not to mention the price tag! They could sell the drug to consumers and the antidote to credit card companies. What if some people were immune or something like that? What a whole new can of worms!
Not to mention the price tag! They could market the drug to consumers and the antidote to credit card companies. Yikes! I smell money!!!
Maria: Sorry you had to post that twice…all of a sudden my comments are not updating as they should. Some problem with my cache. And yeah..agree with you there, it has a potential of big money
Joe: yep..totally valuable.
Test comment. If this one doesn’t appear immediately then something wrong with the WP-cache plugin.
It was acting kind of funny. Can you please delete the duplicate and this one too?
Thanks!
Makes the whole pitting your brain against their brains a little more real, doesn’t it?
You know, there should be some research into inducing the saver’s high because you KNOW there is one! Or is that a *warped* version of the spender’s high?
I agree, The saver’s high is addictive!
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