In the News
Watson Lecture: "Neuroeconomics: How Does Your Brain Make Decisions?" by Antonio Rangel, Professor of Neuroscience and Economics
Salad or steak? Work, family, or play? Stop or have another drink? All of those decisions are made, often effectively, by processes imbedded in our brains - but sometimes in self-defeating ways. Neuroeconomics studies the computations made by the brain to make different types of decisions, how those computations are implemented by the brain, and what the differences are between the brains of good and bad decision makers. View this lecture on iTunes U! 10.12.2011
Inside the Brains of Jurors
When jurors consider shortening the prison sentences of convicted criminals, they use parts of the brain associated with sympathy and making moral judgments, according to new work by Caltech neuroeconomist Colin Camerer and colleagues. They found that the most lenient jurors show heightened levels of activity in a brain region associated with discomfort, pain, and imagining the pain that others feel. Read More... 03.27.2011
A good choice involves rapidly combining both value and visual information. Here, the fly chooses the food reward offered by the salient flower, but pays a devastating price falling prey to the camouflaged crab spider. From: http://www.ojibway.ca/spider18.jpg
Seminar Information
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We are at a watershed period of intellectual history that is producing emerging disciplines, such as neuroeconomics, empirical ethics, and social neuroscience. These new disciplines are rapidly uncovering unifying principles ranging across such diverse phenomena as how small groups of neurons 'decide' whether or not to integrate cross-modal sensory information to how people evaluate risky choices, recognize emotions in human faces, choose political candidates, and interact in groups to solve social coordination problems on the basis of such factors as trust and ethical rules. Such unifying principles are the result of highly interdisciplinary research methodologies that integrate neural, psychological, and economic approaches to valuation, human decision making, and social exchange.
Behavioral & Social Neuroscience Option was created to provide innovative training opportunities that cut across traditional neurobiological and social science disciplines.