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Valuable Objects Stimulate Brain More Than Junk
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Dec 26, 2008 05:38 PM
from the klepto-addiction dept.
from the klepto-addiction dept.
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."
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Sorting Mechanism (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Sorting Mechanism (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. There's an old saying that says 'one man's junk is another man's treasure.' And it's 100% true. Try walking through a flea market sometime. Needless to say, most /.ers might go 'meh' at the piles of jewelry and coins laying on the tables, but when we get the used computer parts vendor, our eyes immediately start sorting out the good stuff -- the parts we have use for -- and the junk -- the stuff we'd never touch. The price doesn't matter so much -- value is entirely subjective. For example, I might not find any use for that pile of old Token Ring adapters, but a guy who works on IBM mainframes might.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I might not find any use for that pile of old Token Ring adapters, but a guy who works on IBM mainframes might
False. A guy who worked on token-ring IBM mainframes would have long since killed himself in self-pity after one-too-many nights of "find the sputtering node".
Good god, token ring was such a bastard system in hindsight. Thank god for point-to-point topology!
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Of course, their monthly hydro bill alone could probably cover the cost of a cheap PC server that can do everything the old mainframe does.
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Heh, I was reading and I got to Token Ring and I read it as Tolkien Ring. I thought, I'd totally take one of those "Tolkien Rings" :-)
Behaviourism (Score:2)
Which amounts to simple behaviourism. Nothing new here.
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That answers the questions I was about to ask: Did diamonds stimulate more than non-valuable shiny objects, was there a cultural bias, how did 100 years of "Diamonds are Forever" affect the results, etc...
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Sounds good and all, but historically, we've not hunted animals - herd animals, at least - on a "which one looks better" - ie, historically, we were not trophy hunters. That is a reasonably new occurrence in our societies. Historically (and even today, throughout most of the world and even where trophy hunting is common) hunters will take the least valuable animals - they hunt to provide food, yes, but also to cull the herd and sustain the food. They'll take the older, sickly animals to retain the health o
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OMG I feel so informed (Score:2)
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.
Whose brains, exactly? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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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'.
I believe we call very close approximations to this ideal "art."
also works with... (Score:5, Insightful)
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About a year back, I noticed that almost ALL of the stories on the main page were (as far as I was concerned) non-news events that just cluttered the main page. I had actually been considering giving up reading slashdot. Instead, I changed my preferences to put EVERYTHING from the sections on the main page. I have a much more enjoyable slashdot experience now.
Or (Score:2)
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?
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I suppose the comments above noting how the experiment was done weren't there (or at least weren't scored so high) when you commented, and of course, who RTFAs? Well, I RTFAed (acronyms in past tense, yay!), and you... obviously didn't.
What they did is show people images, some of which were worth 10 cents (for a total of $10 if you got them all right), some of which were worth nothing.
Then they used an MRI on the volunteers while having them review the images and found those images that had been associated
Not at all surprising. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 aroun
Obvious, but did you think of it? (Score:2)
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.
How old of a brain? (Score:2)
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.
Re:How old of a brain? (Score:4, Funny)
To a young brain, anything that somebody else picks up instantly becomes immeasurably valuable.
Parent
One person's "junk" is another person's treasure (Score:2)
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
Re:One person's "junk" is another person's treasur (Score:2)
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.
Re:One person's "junk" is another person's treasur (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Parent
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Mmm. Pretty things.
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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
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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
they need to do this with pr0n (Score:2)
Valuable Articles Stimulate Brain More Than Junk (Score:2)
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 stu
Christmas is not a holiday season (Score:5, Insightful)
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"?
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The "holiday season" around the winter solstice and its attendant celebrations pre-date Jesus by thousands of years.
Christmas, unlike Easter, was a minor feast until the Roman Catholic Church decided to do something about all the former pagans who still carried on many of their former traditions, rather than contributing all of their wealth to the Church. Whether many of those older traditions included gift giving is hard to say since the Church's agents tended to destroy pagan writing and other artifacts
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Christmas, unlike Easter, was a minor feast until the Roman Catholic Church decided to do something about all the former pagans who still carried on many of their former traditions
Similarly, Hanukkah was a pretty minor holiday but because of its proximity to christmas it has become significantly more recognized. Thus the "holiday season" is appropriate as a term to refer to the time roughly from Diwali through Chinese new year. That range will also cover Eid al-Adha (but not Eid al-Fitr).
After all it is a season of holidays, not just a single holiday.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Even fanatical Christians celebrate New Year's and Christmas Eve, so "holiday season" is an accurate term to describe a number of separate single days usually associated with revelry and gift-giving. Some people even use these days for traveling and vacationing.
Since my birthday also falls in December, and since we got off school for weeks at a time, as a child I assumed the whole month of December was one big holiday.
Notice: I didn't even have to talk about the winter solstice, Roman festivals, Jews, Afric
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Even fanatical Christians celebrate New Year's and Christmas Eve, so "holiday season" is an accurate term to describe a number of separate single days usually associated with revelry and gift-giving. Some people even use these days for traveling and vacationing.
Whatever happened to "Merry Christmas *and* a Happy New Year"? Just because it is an accurate term doesn't mean it is a good one. There was nothing wrong with the original term and it acknowledged that Christmas actually still exists despite how much secularists hate it. And again, we have 2 holidays in January, 1 in February, another in March and so on. Why is this time of year only referred to as "holiday season"? The average holiday count is still 1 per month. The reason? It is to gradually remove the ex
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Is there really a secular movement against Christmas in (I'm guessing) America? I'm extremely a-religious as are most of my associates but I like christmas apart from the nauseating carols and rampant commercialism. Of course, I'm from New Zealand in the crazy southern hemisphere where we have a barbecue and play cricket for christmas. You can pry my mid-summer holidays from my cold dead hands!
I assumed the 'holiday season' nonsense was political correctness run wild, what with the dredging up of non-christ
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Not everyone is Christian (and several religions have holidays around this time of the year.) And for many Christians around the world, Christmas is 12 days long. Look up the Twelve Days of Christmas on Wikipedia if you must.
Diversity does not entail ignoring all holidays and calling it a "holiday season". Diversity means *acknowledging* everyone. You can't acknowledge something if you totally ignore it by never calling it by name. The whole point of "holiday season" is so secularists can have one more win by ignoring Christmas. Christmas has been celebrated for thousands of years and only in the last few years have companies and the media thought they should try not offending the minorities by referring to this time of year by
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Hi, I also replied to you above but I'm not stalking you I swear! Nice sweater, by the way.
In New Zealand 'Christmas holidays' is a pretty common term since most people have several days off around Christmas. It's a popular time to take annual leave by using one or two leave days to make a four or five day 'weekend' including Christmas - so you ask 'what are you doing for your christmas holidays?'. There's a difference in the usage of 'holidays' in New Zealand though, I think it lines up with 'vacation' in
Not surprising, but answer this... (Score:2)
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 differe
duh (Score:3, Funny)
So they are telling us that we are easily dis
Look! A sparkly thingy!
Wonderful discovery - NOT (Score:2)
Congratulations - they've discovered GREED. Film at 11.
How would you rate OSs? (Score:2)
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 inte
Tonight, boys and girls, we learn how to say "DUH" (Score:2)
What would have been news is if this "study" had NOT gotten the results that it did.
News break. Film at 11 (Score:2)
Objects that stimulate the brain the most are wanted by individuals the most. Objects wanted by most are more valuable.
Re:Dear God (Score:5, Funny)
You must have bought a subscription while drunk
I know I was
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
You seriously must teach us how you post to slashdot via telepathy ;)
SB
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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.
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It's on my list.
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Because overpriced objects stimulate the brain more?