Financial worries on the brain

Certainly noone would argue the fact that 2008 has been a stressful year.  If you are just talking about economic news, it has been a story at least since last March when the subprime mortgage debacle started.

Whether you are talking about your own mortgage or your investments, this stress is increasingly trackable in the brain because brain science is improving. Our ability to track phenomenon within the brain means we can actually see the stress and psychological consequences of things even as large and intractable as a financial meltdown. 

Today people across the country are overwhelmed with the fear of loss: fear of losing one’s job, fear of losing one’s life savings, fear of losing all our money in a Bernie Madoff-style ponzi scheme. Can all of this anxiety be bad for our brains? Of course!

Dr. Gregory Berns is the Director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and author of the book "Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently." He explains how fear can impair our brain functions.

"The way we do this is through a new field called Neuroeconomics, which is about four or five years old.  The basic technology is we have people go inside of an MRI scanner and have them make actual decision-making tasks while we scan their brains."

"It’s like decoding the genome, except it’s actually much more difficult," says Dr. Berns.

Dr. Berns says that the brain has likely evolved in a way that assigned specific locations to certain primal tasks like eating, drinking, and pain.  "When it comes to stress and anxiety and fear, these functions actually co-opt parts of the brain that function in terms of pain.  So, when you are fearful or anxious, it is literally using the same parts of the brain that you would use when you are afraid of pricking your finger on a needle."

"One thing we actually see is that when people make economic decisions, and there is the possibility of losing money, that we see a lot of activity in parts of the brain associated with pain."

When that stress is elevated and manifests itself to those around us, Dr. Berns says, "Unfortunately it is a feeback loop, where the more people that are stressed around you, it just feeds into the phenomenon, and tends to run away."

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