In This is Your Brain on Money, I mentioned that I'd visit some of the other neuromarketing-related topics raised in Jason Zweig's interesting article in Money, Your money and your brain. One of these is that our brains are programmed for "reward anticipation" but aren't very good at calculating odds. Big potential rewards produce big responses,…

For those of us past the age of childhood, there's good news from MIT and Johns Hopkins: conclusive proof that adult brains are capable of reorganization and…

Can you imagine a more difficult marketing task than selling books written by long-dead authors like Plutarch or Pliny the Younger to middle-class Americans?…

Everyone is familiar with the want vs. should conflict. Do you order the loaded cheese fries as your side dish, or the steamed broccoli? You want the greasy…

There's an epidemic of obesity in the U.S., and new research helps explain the difficulty many people have in avoiding fattening foods. British researchers…

If you thought that "pink is for girls, blue is for boys" was mere gender stereotyping, you'll be surprised by research results that show women really do prefer…

One of the enduring fictions of neuromarketing is that there is a "buy button" in the brain. Marketers salivate at the thought, and consumer groups fear it.…

The human mind may be well suited to surviving in dangerous forests and plains, but it doesn't do as well with modern financial decisions. A lengthy and…

In our recent article on The Mating Mind, we described how "romantically primed" men were much more likely to spend lots of money than men who were not so…

The Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Matter, and Tomorrow's Brain (Edited by Floyd E. Bloom MD; Dana Press, 270 pp.) is a wide-ranging…