How We Decide

Once this overlapping of ideas occurs, cortical cells start to form connections that have never existed before, wiring themselves into entirely new networks.

cognitive contretemps—this

Some economists are already working on that. They are using this brain-imaging data to support a new political philosophy known as asymmetric paternalism. That's a fancy name for a simple idea: creating policies and incentives that help people triumph over their irrational impulses and make better, more prudent decisions. Shlomo Benartzi and Richar

George Loewenstein, the neuroeconomist, thinks that understanding the errors of the emotional brain will help policymakers develop plans that encourage people to make better decisions: "Our emotions are like software programs that evolved to solve important and recurring problems in our distant past," he says. "They are not always we

The anchoring effect demonstrates how a single additional fact can systematically distort the reasoning process.

(These are patients who have had the corpus callosum—the nerve tissue that connects the two hemispheres of the brain—severed.

(Emotion and motivation share the same Latin root, movere, which means "to move.")

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When the scenario was described in terms of deaths instead of survivors,…

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