Bringing Neuroscience and Economics Together
By: Katherine Hollen
Illustrations by Katherine Hollen
The Decision Making: Neuroscience Meets Economics symposium stands at the intersection of neuroscience and economics, offering a unique platform to explore how our brains navigate choices—from everyday decisions to complex societal outcomes. The event, spearheaded by Leslie Griffith, a professor at Brandeis University specializing in molecular and cellular neuroscience, and Eric Maskin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Harvard, has become a beacon for bringing together experts from both fields to examine the science behind decision-making processes. Griffith, renowned for her groundbreaking research on how memories are formed, stored, and retrieved from the brain, and Maskin, whose pioneering work in mechanism design has transformed our understanding of social and economic systems, share a common vision: unlocking the mysteries of decision-making. Recognizing the growing interest in neuroeconomics over the past decade, Griffith and Maskin sought to create a space for individuals, particularly young minds, to explore both neuroscience and economics. As Griffith puts it, “We were two people from different fields coming together with the shared interest in making decisions.” The symposium brought together leading scholars to explore these intertwined domains.
One featured speaker, Antonio Rangel, a professor at Caltech, delved into how the brain evaluates and compares options during decision-making. By combining neuroscience, psychology, and economics, Rangel’s work sheds light on how we assign value to choices and how emotions like empathy influence decisions. His research could have profound implications for improving self-control, designing better public policies, and understanding human behavior in economic contexts.
Another key speaker, Rebecca Yang, focuses on how fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, make decisions. Yang’s research explores the genetic and neural circuits behind learning and decision-making, revealing how the brain assigns value to rewards. By understanding these processes in flies, her work holds promise for broader insights into how not only simple but complex brains evaluate choices, highlighting the link between neural systems and decision-making.
Michael Woodford, a leading economist at Columbia University, examined how cognition influences economic choices. His research on bounded rationality—the idea that people use mental shortcuts rather than perfect rationality when making decisions—has expanded our understanding of human behavior in economic settings. Woodford’s work is pivotal in reshaping economic models to incorporate the ways people actually process information and make decisions, with implications for investment strategies and monetary policy.
Donald Katz, a professor of psychology at Brandeis University, also contributed to the symposium, whose research focuses on how the brain processes taste and its connection to emotions and behavior. His research explores how specific tastes trigger feelings like “yum” or “yuck,” influencing whether rats eat or reject food. Katz’s work examines how animals learn to associate food with positive or negative outcomes and how other sensory experiences, like sight and sound, are linked to taste. His findings provide valuable insights into how sensory perceptions shape decision-making and emotional responses.
Luminita Stevens, a macroeconomist at the University of Maryland, challenged traditional economic models by examining how imperfect information processing affects larger economic outcomes like inflation and income inequality. Stevens’ work explores how limited attention and cognitive imprecision impact groups’ and individuals’ decisions, offering a more nuanced understanding of economic behavior.
Lastly, Benjamin de Bivort, a professor at Harvard, rounded out the symposium with his research on individual differences in behavior. Using fruit flies as a model, de Bivort investigates how specific neural circuits and genes contribute to variations in behavior, even among individuals with identical genetics. His research sheds light on how these variations may be tied to ecological adaptation and psychological disorders, offering valuable insights into behavior and evolutionary processes.
The Decision Making: Neuroscience Meets Economics symposium serves as a vivid example of how two seemingly separate fields can come together to enrich our understanding of the human decision-making process. By merging the biological and economic perspectives, Griffith, Maskin, and their colleagues have paved the way for new interdisciplinary approaches that could revolutionize our behavior, policy, and decision-making at both the individual and societal levels. With such a dynamic blend of expertise, the future of neuroeconomics looks bright, offering the promise of more profound insights into the very essence of how we make choices.
