How to ‘light up’ your brain like Warren Buffett  Published:
July 17, 2014 5:00 a.m. ET     Mitch's Latest Posts  Powered by
So, what’s on your nucleus accumbens?  Does Warren Buffett think
differently from you and me? The science says yes, he does.
Researchers from Caltech and Virginia Tech set up a virtual
trading game to study how ordinary people make choices in a
volatile market. Then they took scans of the participants'
brains as they tried to make money.  The scientists (they call
themselves "neuroeconomists") looked closely at oxygen flow to
regions of the brain, watching them "light up" as activity
levels surged. As it turns out, in a bull market most people's
brains fire in the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain that
processes the idea of reward. They buy and buy more, right past
the price peak.  Fascinatingly, researchers found that pricing
bubbles happened without external prompting, such as media hype.
Watching cable TV pundits doesn't help, yet most of us are
perfectly capable of losing mon