Encefalus

Hi there people,
This time, I am going to talk about a subject that’s the main focus of half the conversations that take place in the country where I live in: Greece. For those of you who don’t read the news, Greece has been on the verge of economic collapse in the last few months. People [...]

The last summer I was reading this book: The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics

The book was dealing mainly with the complexity of economic systems. It actually tried to introduce a new field of economic analysis Complexity Economics, that is inspired by the recent trend of complexity science and [...]

Lately I’ve been digging into the subject of agent based models of social sciences. Agent based models are defined by wikipedia as following

An agent-based model (ABM) is a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous individuals in a network, with a view to assessing their effects on the system as a whole. [...]

Neuroeconomics Explained, Part One
Neuroeconomics Explained, Part Two
While searching the web the other day, I found two very interesting introductory articles on neuroeconomics on Psychology Today. The author is Paul J. Zak who is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. In his bio on his [...]

The readers of Encefalus probably remember this article: A different view on economics: maybe all we really need.
I found this article recently in the New York Times: The Behavioral Revolution. It is an article that expresses some views similar to the ones we expressed in A different view on economics: maybe all we really need, [...]

The recent economic crisis made me think a lot about the subject of economics. As I’ve said in earlier posts, I’m very interested in economics, and I believe them to be an integral part of cognitive science, or any science that aims to comprehend the human behavior and civilization (Some thoughts on a new micro-economic [...]

The other day I was writing an article for Encefalus concerning economics and studying their relation to psychology. However, as I was writing it, I stumbled upon some problems, like what is the definition of economics. Obviously, modern economists might have different opinions among them, and I, as a psychologist, have a different view on [...]

GeorgeLoewenstein
Remember the article Lotteries, poverty and social implications? I found this article in Scientific American : Lottery Tickets and Credit Cards: The Dangers of an Irrational Brain. It’s an interview with the researcher who’s work we commented in Lotteries, poverty and social implications. He is called George Loewenstein.
What I particularly liked about this interview is [...]

What do you really know about your subconscious mind?
Subliminal Learning Demonstrated In Human Brain
The above link is from Science Daily. It reports of the findings of this paper Subliminal Instrumental Conditioning Demonstrated in the Human Brain published in Neuron magazine. 

Although the idea that instrumental learning can occur subconsciously has been around for nearly a century, [...]

Why play a losing game? Study uncovers why low-income people buy lottery tickets.
This above link is some news posted on Eurekalert. It’s a study proving that poor people are more likely to buy lottery tickets
"In the study, published in the July issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, participants who were made to feel [...]