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Valuable Objects Stimulate Brain More Than Junk
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to researchers at the University of California at San Diego, visual areas of our brain respond more to valuable objects than other ones. In other words, our brain has stronger reactions when we see a diamond ring than we look at junk. Similarly, our brain vision areas are more excited by a Ferrari than, say, a Tata new Nano car. In this holiday season, I'm sure you've received gifts that excited your brain — and others that you already want to resell on an auction site."
The thing to note here is that value remains subjective. The actual test didn't show subjects diamond rings or big houses. It showed them simple images of neutral value that then paid off in varying amounts when selected. It was the amount of the payoff that influenced the subject's perception of the object. An object that paid off at $10 generated a stronger response than an item that had paid off at $0.10.
So the concept of a diamond ring registering more highly than junk depends on the "eye of the beholder." The images in the study were associated with receiving a reward. So a guy might not associate a diamond ring with a rewaed, but might see a pile of junk and think of all the fun he could have by building neat stuff with it.
They talk about how this research may give insight into addiction, but I really think it's just a sorting mechanism. It's our way of training ourselves from experience how to pick the most likely target from the herd, sort the best fruits from the pile, etc., in the shortest possible time.
Start a happiness pandemic
So would all people find a Ferrari more stimulating (neurologically speaking) than a Nano or does it depend on culture?
If it is inbuilt and not a cultural difference perhaps it is possible to extrapolate an idealised design of an object people will perceive as 'valuable'. Could be useful for marketing purposes.
slashdot headlines... informative and interesting ones stimulate my brain far more than non-news events that just clutter the main page.
does it have to do with quality?
Would a picture of say an inexpensive home stimulate a persons brain more or less than say an image of a sports car?
Or what about a run of the mill airliner to say a Ferrari?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Humans pay more attention to more salient or novel stimuli. Something valuable, or more desired, is going to pop out.
In evolutionary terms, food sources that were more scarce--food 'worth' more, you can say--would definitely demand more attention that random vegetable matter, be it prey or fruits or so on. Same thing with water, or more attractive mates, or perhaps good sources of shelter, or so on.
The result of this experiment is entirely what you would expect.
You must have bought a subscription while drunk
I know I was
Well, that's interesting. It's as if our brains spend more effort when the task is to determine how valuable something is to us, as opposed to determining how worthless it is. It seems obvious, and probably is, but still, it shows that we treat "value" as more important to precisely define, as "lack of value."
If something is junk, it makes no sense to waste time thinking about just how devoid of value is actually is.
Exactly! And while we're being sarcastic, let's chastise all those people who spent years studying fruit flies. This is how science works, buddy. Slow, seemingly insignificant steps following well-established research programs, only some of which possibly lead to larger discoveries in the future.
Trust me, kids; don't drink and post.
I would guess that this is part of brain formation, as the brain learns what is valuable and what is not. I would expect that the same results would NOT be found in younger brains.
How, exactly, did they determine what qualifies as "junk" and what doesn't? Monetary rewards? Doesn't that invalidate their experiment by restricting it to people who regard money as a means to an end?
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
This has no effect on me.
I've got your sig, right here.
Hope that clears up my bumbly explanation
Everything is easy when you don't understand the problem.
You know Raccoons and Retards are attracted to shiny objects.
This looks like the next in the ongoing series of "fMRI results of the week", but I was already quite sure about this without fMRI because I know how the notion of value maps onto the realm of images of women.
Value means that something is inherently important or has become important through previous experience and reinforcement. The source of "value" is irrelevant; anything that is important is so because the experience has primed us to respond. That the brain should reflect such activity is not only trivial, it's well established.
TFA does not examine "value". It examines the effect of reinforcement to an arbitrary choice to subsequent choices. The paradigm used is a "go-no go" design. There's nothing in the study that differentiates value from simple learning and response selection.
Particularly egregious is the author's attempt to connect this poorly designed research to addiction. If this held, then the more something costs the more addictive it should be, and the less valuable it is the less addictive: free heroin is not habit forming.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The value was set via the study; some objects were associated with a higher payoff than others. In other words, they separated out the question of what makes something valuable and studied what happened once objects were already invested with differential monetary values. So they tried at least to control for the issue raised in your question.
In this holiday season, I'm sure you've received gifts that excited your brain -- and others that you already want to resell on an auction site."
Actually I received gifts for Christmas, not this holiday season, you insensitive clod! We have holidays all year round. Why should Christmas be recast as an entire holiday season (gift giving is irrelevant as far as calling it a holiday season) in its own right, other than for being able to ignore its existence by not calling it by name?
Mod me down if you want but only if you have good reason to; disagreement is not a valid reason. If this comment wasn't geared toward Christmas then it shouldn't have been posted the day after but instead near Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, but no one ever pays attention to those holidays anyway, at least, the retailers don't pay attention to them when they advertise sales. Their excuse for using "holiday season" is to falsely state their inclusion of other holidays. I guess lies don't matter as long as you turn a profit. What's your excuse for using "holiday season"?
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
What about objects that are "valuable" to people without having any monetary value? Art, music... while some people put monetary value on those objects, I doubt that most people do.
As an example, I have a portrait of myself done by an artist in a bar some years ago; it was done freely and given freely, yet I consider it one of the most "valuable" objects I own. I also have a considerable rock collection - none of it collected for any monetary value, but just for my memories of the trip I collected it on. I daresay many people have similar.
There are an awful lot of things the people own that have "sentimental" value - value only to themselves, for their own reasons. Putting a monetary value on objects has to have skewed their results considerably.
I'm no psych researcher, this is just my opinion... which isn't worth much to anyone but me, honestly ;)
Thanks
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
On the contrary, heroin is addictive because it directly stimulates reward pathways, instead of using a secondary reinforcer (such as money). The researchers used money because it's a relatively universal secondary reinforcer, which is easier and more ethical than rounding up a dozen heroine addicts and giving them heorin as a reward. This study may open some doors for research on addictive behavior: How does visual perception for an addict differ from a non-addict, specifically with relationship to items/locations associated with the addictive agent?
Everything is easy when you don't understand the problem.
I'm aware of how science works. All the little steps add up to huge advancements.
I'd posit that things have value because we desire them, rather than we want things because they are valuable. Maybe that viewpoint stems from thinking too much of economies these days.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
"our brain has stronger reactions when we see a diamond ring than we look at junk."
I get off more at a computer swap meet looking at junk hardware than going to De Beers any day of the week, I guess it all depends on who they test.
And a bit shout out to the lads and lasses working in the field of logical fallacies. False analogies FTW!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I guess what I'm really asking is aren't they really finding out how societal and cultural mores affect people, more than how "objects" in general stimulate the brain?
Enlighten me...
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
The human response to an object is based on something. It exists, so it pretty much has to be, right? But *what* is it based on? Where do the "values" come from when we see an object? Are they the result of a conscious decision, based on a series of choices, derived from the ability to think and choose and also based on memories of the past? Or are these values simply "embedded" into us as we experience things, and experienced again in their triggering upon the sight of such objects?
To put it a different way, does the result of this experiment imply that things which we value are determined, or does it imply that we determine the things that we value? Can you say either way?
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
This goes into the pile of obvious scientific discoveries.
Like these notable scientific discoveries:
1. Drunk women are more amorous.
2. Eating Chocolate makes us feel better.
3. People with well proportioned faces are better looking.
It's news that valuable objects stimulate my girlfriend's brain more than my junk?
You must have seen that on http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/benjamin_wallace_on_the_price_of_happiness.html. :)
Which is a really great website! Full of interesting videos.
So they are telling us that we are easily dis
Look! A sparkly thingy!
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
So what they are actually measuring is how social and cultural stimuli of one sort - money - makes changes in the brain.
If the concept of value differs from individual to individual - which it does - then what they've measured is only one facet of that sort of stimuli.
They could put additional images in there, like, say, beautiful members of the opposite (or same) sex, music, art, sunrises and sunsets, and other things that don't necessarily have monetary value; would the results be the same? Would people's brains be stimulated in the same way? I doubt it.
What they are measuring, as far as I can tell, is how the monetary value of an object stimulates the brain - not anything as general as the concept of "value".
If they are limiting their concept of "value" to monetary value, then their study really doesn't prove anything, other than that their subjects value money, which as you point out is unfortunately a predisposition of modern society.
This probably has a lot of relevance to economists, but I fail to see how it has any relevance at all to how the brain works. A rat scurrying across the floor could be seen as valuable to someone who is starving to death. That rat doesn't have monetary value - it has survival value. Perhaps they should have expanded their study a bit.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
So it wasn't The One Ring's fault after all of that effort! It was the people!
Sméagol had it right, the ring was my precious!!!
Which amounts to simple behaviourism. Nothing new here.
@SoupGuru: Some things obviously have intrinsic value (e.g. food and water) whereas other things obviously have value assigned to them by different groups (e.g. sports cars). This study had to do with the actual neural response to perceived value, which makes its result non-trivial, regardless of how well it meshes with common-sense.
@Rogerborg: I don't really get what you're calling a "false analogy", but I'm assuming you meant my comparing the parent's attitude to Palin's absurd comments about genetic research on fruit flies, since that was the only analogy employed. And I have some time to kill, so... There is no such thing as a "false analogy", only bad analogies. Analogies can be drawn between any two things that share any similarity, and any two things may share some feature. And any analogy, no matter how good, never lends itself to perfect deductive inference, so that all analogies can be regarded as "logical fallacies". Oh, and by the way, they're called logicians. Oh, and you misspelled "big". Dick.
Damn. I've gone and gotten pedantic on the internets again... stupid alcohol.
Trust me, kids; don't drink and post.
I think it's the other way around: we place a high "intrinsic" value on certain objects because they stimulate our brains the way they do. Otherwise why should compressed carbon or base metals be worth more or less than anything else? Iron is a more useful metal than gold or silver for making tools, and you can't burn diamonds to keep warm in the winter.
Congratulations - they've discovered GREED. Film at 11.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
No this is on topic, for me I sense more value in Linux and it stimulates my brain (thinking of the cool things I can do with it)
Same could go for some fan of Windows compared to other OSs or for that matter OS X compared to the other two.
Value is in the mind of the beholder. For those car analogies I think uniqueness would rate just as high say a $150,000 car vs a genuine DeLoerean. It's all subjective.
I think A Yugo would likely stimulate the brains of people in a remote region that has very little interaction with cars.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Yeah, "valuable objects" stimulate me more than some guy's junk.
Mmm. Pretty things.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
It's on my list.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
in other news, a shiny new Lamborghini stand out in a school parking lot. Seriously how is it news that something expensive (i.e. typically rare) stimulates the brain more. Anything that's rare, out of place, or new typically grabs more of our attention. It's a natural response from our neocortex.
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Because overpriced objects stimulate the brain more?
It has been known for decades that the brain responds to visual images of highly desirable things much more strongly than it does to images of ordinary things.
What would have been news is if this "study" had NOT gotten the results that it did.
If expensive items stimulate our mnds much more than junk, Wynona Ryder must be stimulated as hell.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
I'm now working on the obvious complementary study, "Sexy Objects Stimulate Junk More Than Brain." Funding please!
They really need a second experiment, to see if it's evaluated value or initial reaction that stimulates most. IE: Instead of a picture of a real Ferrari, they should have a picture of a model. Good enough that it looks right at first glance, but closer evaluation reveals the differences. Similarly, replace the diamond ring with a glass and gold-plated rip-off.
Then, to really mix things up, replace the 'junk' with valuable stuff which might appear junk at first glance. You need stuff that, when you think about it, is actually worth a lot. Maybe collectibles or something, or a battered-old box labeled "$1M" with the edges of some notes sticking out?
mysql> SELECT * FROM `places` WHERE `place` LIKE 'home`; Empty set (0.00 sec)
Objects that stimulate the brain the most are wanted by individuals the most. Objects wanted by most are more valuable.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I'm no expert in this field, so my apologies if I'm talking out of my ass, but wouldn't these results still be unsurprising if you consider attentional factors? Valuable objects (i.e., more salient things) would more "grab" a subject's attention and thus it would not be unsurprising to figure that the brain would engage in more sensory processing of the object, low-level or not? I'm thinking along the lines of how we filter out background noise when it's unimportant to us, like ignoring conversation around as at a party or such.
...'Prospero Ano Nuevo'. (won't permit the tilde)
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.