Science Of Economics By Neuroscientist Marco Iacaboni

1. In the first chapter of Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, it talks about dealing with societal mores, economic incentives, and cheating. With schoolteachers, the possibility of getting a pay raise and the grades their students get on standardized tests are some of the incentives that derive them to cheat. In the book, Levitt explains how he examines sets of answers to these tests and tries to see a pattern if teachers were changing answers for their students. Dubner and Levitt, both incorporate samples of these scored tests and have the readers try and find the cheating detected on there. “Teacher cheating is rarely looked for, hardly ever detected, and just about never punished.” (Levitt and Dubner 24) The incentives for teachers are to be more recognized and a chance to get a better pay while, for sumo wrestlers, they can move up a rank. The only difference is that for sumo wrestlers, they never got caught because in Japan, they assume they are always telling the truth and never lying, while for teachers, some lost their jobs because they were caught. “Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less.” (Levitt and Dubner 21) Cheating is something I have witnessed multiple of times while being in school. There were students who would help and talk during tests to get better grades on the exam since the teacher wasn’t paying attention to the class when we took the test. At the end of it all, they did get away with it and the reason

With the recent developments in the economy there could have not been a better time to

Mirror neurons have been hailed by scientists as the most significant finding in neurology in the past decade, the key to understanding the secrets of human interaction and learning, and as significant to psychology as DNA is to biology. Mirror neurons are a newly-discovered structure of the brain responsible for the firing of neurons during both physical movement and the observation of physical movement. It is these firings during observation of movements that has scientists excited about their relation to learning and interaction. While mirror neurons have been found in both primates and humans, their role in terms of learning and perfecting motor skills is still unclear.

Freakonomics By Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner is based on these fundamental ideas: Incentives, conventional wisdom, “Experts”-use their informational advantage

4.Hegarty, S. (2011, December 05). What phantom limbs and mirrors teach us about the brain. Retrieved February 25, 2017, from http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15938103

The Prefrontal Cortex is involved in planning of behavior, attention and judgment and the orbitofrontal cortex plays an important role in emotions and impulse control. This is related to the article because in order for people to feel empathy, their orbitofrontal cortex has to function. To act the way people do when approached by their competitors, people need their prefrontal cortex to act how they would. The article does not necessarily contradict any of the content we learned but it gives examples of how there structures in our brain aid in our behavior and in the way we act. If these parts of our brain weren’t working, people would experience impulsiveness, antisocial behavior, experience of various emotions and deficits in the ability

Dolphins are able to plan their behavior to achieve a solution more efficiently, as well as create novel behaviors. Trained to move weights across a pool to receive a reward, each dolphin independently deduced that they could carry multiple weights at once to reduce the number of trips (Kuczaj et al., 2009). In another test they were able to plan the order of dropping weights in order to optimize the number of fish rewards they could receive (Kuczaj et al., 2009). These demonstrated their ability to analyze problems, plan an appropriate solution, and carry it out in an efficient order. Mirror self-recognition (MSR) has also been demonstrated in bottlenose dolphins, with the dolphins using the mirror to investigate a mark on their heads using a mirror, a level of self-awareness only shared by great apes (Marino, 2002). It is possible that the level of cortical connectivity is a significant factor in the emergence of complex cognitive capabilities such as self-recognition (Marino,

Every behavior begins with biology. Our behaviors, as well as our thoughts and feelings, are produced by the actions of our brains, nerves, muscles, and glands. In this chapter we will begin our journey into the world of psychology by considering the biological makeup of the human being, including the most remarkable of human organs—the brain. We’ll consider the structure of the brain and also the methods that psychologists use to study the brain and to understand how it works.

I am applying for a M.Sc. in Health Economics at the University of York in the U.K. This program of study will provide an opportunity to compare efficient health systems in the US, UK and Australia with the goal of identifying areas for improvement both from a cost as well as the health utilization perspective.

The researchers concluded that this indicated mirror neurons coded not just for action, but the goals of action. Kohler and colleagues (2007) expanded on this idea, showing that some neurons were activated with the mere sound of the result of an intended action (i.e. cracking a peanut). The authors asserted that this indicated that mirror neurons were so tuned to goals that the sound of an action reaching its goal was enough for the macaque to understand the entire action that would have been involved. The results of both studies were said to apply neatly to humans as well. That is, if action understanding is supported by the mirror neuron system of macaques, it is most likely supported by the human mirror neuron system (hMNS). There are two major problems with this view. First, it has been shown that human mirror neurons are much more broadly tuned than monkeys. There is not enough evidence to generalize macaque studies to humans in this way (Hickok 2008). Second, both of these studies fail to acknowledge that the activation of mirror neurons may have been the result, or a byproduct, of understanding rather than the cause. Their activity, then, may only have reflected understanding earlier in processing.

All behaviour is provided by the nervous system from a blinking eye to talking. Everything we do relies on the integration of numerous processes within the body, which is controlled by the nervous system (Atkinson et al. 1990). It wasn’t until the late 19th Century with the development of stronger magnifying lenses and staining techniques that the nervous system could be looked at in detail (Wickens, 2005). The integrating units of the nervous system are specialized cells called neurons. There are approximately 1 billion neurons in a human brain. What makes them more astonishing is that each single neuron is connected with around 10,000 others (Wickens,

The main point the author made was that if one person or monkey see someone else or something doing an action they will follow and repeat the action and then later forget they learned that from someone else. she also made the point that researchers have not been able to prove that humans have individual mirror neurons like monkeys, they have shown that humans have a more general mirror system. I think that the author believes that if one sees someone else doing something they will most likely to mimic what has been done in front of them. the main point is to teach us about the mirror neurons. this is the brain record the difference between seeing and acting. this is the type of brain cell that fires when you do an action, and also when you simply watch someone else doing the same action. Temma supported her main point by stating that many people often confused their own actions with others.in a study did on people who watched a video learning to shuffle a deck of card often mistaken recalled two weeks later that they had once done so themselves. this occurred when the person was told that they could mix up others actions with their own actions ( page33).

5 in Nature Neuroscience. De Lecea is the senior author. The lead author is postdoctoral scholar Ada Eban-Rothschild, PhD.

Emotions run the world: many buy the “perfect dress” to feel confident, others run for fun, and others sleep as their sadness increases. Thus, in a world where emotions lead, mankind struggles to reason. Dr. Mark G. Baxter, a neuroscientist at Harvard University, and Dr. Elisabeth A. Murray, a Senior Investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health, are perfect examples of why many professionals in the science and medical field should start to investigate the amygdala, an “almond-shaped group of nuclein” associated with emotion, due to it being one of the most important parts of the brain as it is what defines what people do in their everyday basis. Nature, one of the most respected journals in the scientific community, published Dr. Baxter and Dr. Murray’s “The Amygdala and Reward” on July 2002 Nature Publishing Group arguing through ethos and logical appeals that the amygdala processes reward in the brain as well a negative emotions. Both neuroscientists prove the importance of understanding the connections between reward and emotions by analyzing their experiments performed on moneys and other primates, and including facts and statistics from other scientists and doctors. This well crafted article conscientiously analyzes how the amygdala’s role in stimulus-reward learning might be just as important as its role in processing negative fear and conditioning by providing credibility, reliability, logic, and reason to the audience.

judgements, language and control our social behaviour is processed in the frontal lobe. Due to the