Word: knutson
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Stanford neuroscientist Brian Knutson has zeroed in on a more primitive aspect of making choices. "We come equipped to assess potentially good things and potentially bad things," he says. "There should be stuff in your brain that promotes your survival, whether you have learned those things or not--such as being scared of the dark or the unknown." Knutson calls these anticipatory emotions, and he believes that even before the cognitive areas of the brain are brought in to assess options, these more intuitive and emotional regions are already priming the decision-making process and can foreshadow the outcome. Such...
...test his theory, Knutson and his team devised a way to mimic these same intuitive reactions in the lab. He gave subjects $20 each and, while they were in the fMRI machine, presented them with pictures of 80 products, each followed by a price. Subjects then had the option of purchasing each item on display. As they viewed products they preferred, Knutson saw activity in the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain involved in anticipating pleasant outcomes. If, on the other hand, the subjects thought the price of these items was too high, there was increased activity...
...this, of course, is whirring along at the brain's split-second pace, and as imaging technology improves, Knutson is hopeful that he and others will be able to see in even more detail the circuits in the brain activated during a decision. Already, according to Montague, these images have revealed surprising things about how the brain pares down the decision-making process by setting up shortcuts to make its analysis more efficient. To save time, the brain doesn't run through the laundry list of risks, benefits and value judgments each time. Whenever it can, it relies...
...senior year. Not long after, he met and married 13-year-old Quientana Shotts. Their union was annulled in 1985 after Shotts filed a complaint alleging that Karr had forced her to wed him through "intimidation and fear." Four years later, he married again. This time his bride, Lara Knutson, was 16. By 1996, Karr was a student at Bevill State Community College in Hamilton, Ala., and was working in Marion County as a substitute teacher. But in November of that year, he was removed from the county's roster of substitutes after complaints by parents about his behavior...
...weather overseas. Midwest cattle producers have no grudge against their counterparts in Denmark, but a recent outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease there caused Japan to suspend $215 million worth of Danish meat imports. This could mean some $100 million in unexpected sales for American cattlemen. Says Ronald Knutson, an economist at Texas A&M: "If there is a major crop failure some place in the world, we'll look back on this as a good year." American farmers may be the "miracle workers of the Western world," as President Reagan proudly says, but now many are hoping that...