4/20/2023 0 Comments Joe cable lab upenn![]() To gauge someone’s capacity to delay gratification, he might ask whether they’d prefer to receive $20 immediately or $40 in three months. In his experiments, Kable collects functional brain images as participants evaluate specific tradeoffs, often involving money. “Studying decision-making was a way for me to transition into human neuroscience, focusing on the question ‘Why do people do what they do?’” People are the ones who engage in those things, so why not study the way the brain works in actual people?” says Kable. Then I took a step back and thought about how this thing I was studying-the brain-is responsible for consciousness, art, music, religion. “I started out studying neurochemicals and things at the cellular level. Researchers like Kable use the equipment in a slightly different way so that images show blood flow in the brain, indicating exactly where activity is happening while a person performs some sort of mental task-like making a decision. Luckily for neuroeconomists, observing brain activity in real time is easy with functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI-a noninvasive procedure performed with the same kind of MRI machine physicians use to diagnose many injuries and diseases. I started out studying neurochemicals and things at the cellular level. “Then that neuroscience feeds back into the other fields, because knowing what the brain does and doesn’t do limits your theorizing at the economics and psychology levels.” “Knowing both of those things-the best way to solve a decision problem as well as the things someone is or isn’t considering while making a decision-tells us a little bit about what to look for in the brain to understand the underlying neural process,” Kable says. Modern economic theory posits what decision people should make in a given situation to meet certain goals, but it doesn’t address their actual thought processes-what’s going on inside their minds. Kable’s work sits at what he calls “the crux of neuroeconomics,” a discipline that integrates economics, psychology, and neuroscience to glean a better understanding of economic decision-making. “If we can understand why people make the decisions they do,” he explains, “we might be able to help them to make better ones-to change their behavior and make the world a better place.” Exploring these connections, Kable says, could have implications for the health, safety, and well-being of people everywhere. in neuroscience at Penn in the early aughts and has grown rapidly over the past decade and a half, with researchers uncovering surprising links between neural activity and personal conduct. This area of study was just emerging as he pursued his Ph.D. Kable investigates what brain structure and function reveal about why people make decisions, good or bad. “We nailed what you might assume is the hard part-the immunology problem,” he says. Viral spread persists, however, largely because some people refuse to wear masks or to physically distance themselves from others. ![]() ![]() Within a year of its onset, a vaccine was available. Joseph Kable, Baird Term Professor of PsychologyĬonsider the COVID-19 pandemic, Kable suggests.
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