New OAC Online Seminar: Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde How old brain functions constrain modern economies, 30th January to 11th February

The seminar opens on Monday 30th January and will be closed after Saturday 11th February. The topic and style may involve something of a stretch for the majority of our members, but the questions raised are of universal interest and this is a great opportunity to learn something by interrogating the paper-giver. If there is sufficient interest, we may go beyond just talk to launch some online experiments here at the OAC and, beyond that, there is the prospect of research collaboration in the field. In the meantime, you can read the OAC Press Working Paper and the published results of the experiment to which this more general overview refers, entitled "Fast and Automatic Activation of an Abstract Representation of Money in the Human Ventral Visual Pathway".


Sacha Bourgeois-Girondeis a philosopher and an experimental economist. He is interested in understanding the emergence of modern economic environments and artifacts. His main question is about the biological, and especially neurobiological, resources that have been put to use by humans to shape and adapt to their economic environments. He is running several experiments to try to understand these adaptive processes and the constraints on lay economic cognition and behaviour. He has published empirical, philosophical and formal work to make sense of some typical cognitive biases and behavioral anomalies within that perspective.

Approaches by neuroscience to the production and handling of material artifacts has recently found support for a ‘cultural cortical recycling’ hypothesis (Stout et al. 2008). This hypothesis had already been robustly established for symbolic artifacts such as letters and numbers (Dehaene and Cohen 2007). In both cases, specific cortical maps dedicated to basic perceptual and/or motor functions appear to have been re-used at a relatively recent point in human history (on temporal scales too brief for any anatomical evolution of the brain to take place), allowing new cultural capacities to develop. Such functional recycling both facilitates and constrains the processing of these artifacts. It also presumably plays a role in their emergence and morphogenesis. I present theoretical arguments and preliminary behavioral and neurobiological findings in support of the speculation that the historical emergence and typical neural processing of coins – as both material and symbolic artifacts – might be explained by a similar hypothesis.

Sacha's goal here, however, is to provide the empirical and theoretical background to testing this hypothesis from the perspective of behavioral economic anthropology. This might lead to collaboration with anthropologists in designing and making operational future experiments that could be performed easily online or in the field.

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Sacha,

The time-pressured contexts in which Klein conducts his research may be a red herring. On the other hand, they might be taken as supporting an evolutionary explanation for why the ventral visual pathway is the locus of processes involved in high-speed recognition of similarity. 

An idea that seems to be popping up fairly frequently these days is that the brain is constantly involved in two processes, taking steps to achieve some goal and scanning for possible dangers/opportunities that may make it necessary to interrupt the current goal-oriented process and direct attention elsewhere. The model is the use of interrupts by computer operating systems, in which a program is paused while the computer checks input for higher priority instructions. The evolutionary just-so story envisions step(1) glimpsing something that may be a tiger, (2) glimpsing something that confirms "tiger", and (3) reacting instantly in a way that ensures survival. Extrapolating, it seems to me a plausible supposition that this is exactly the sort of one-back task used in your experiment and that, given the importance of visual input in scanning for possible dangers/opportunities, that the function should be located where you find it, in the ventral visual pathway. Just speculating, of course. It does raise an interesting question, though. What happens when (2) returns "not tiger"? What differentiates (3') "Safe to ignore" from (3") "Let's look more closely"?

Couple of points related to M.Izabel and John. There is a wider relevance here in terms of the human ability to assign semi-automatic validity not just to coins but a whole lot of other learnt cultural phenomena too. Presumably, since this location in the brain is also associated with physiological needs, there might be a similar experiment asking people to recognise 'delicious mushroom', 'tasteless slimy mushroom', 'poisonous mushroom'. Have tests of this kind been done?

Supposing we did the mushroom test would we not have to acknowledge that the validity here is also fundamentally learnt and historical in kind since knowledge of mushrooms has been learnt historically? What I am getting at is that a bit of the brain that is about physiological needs would be kind of useless if it were not plastic enough to take in many very complex nuances of value. So, I want to put in question for a moment that there is a 'basic' physiological-reward-seeking function which is then recycled for a more nuanced task. Perhaps it may be that there is nuancing all the way down so to speak. I am just wondering what you think about this issue.

John,

We looked at the ventral stream or pathway (metaphors abound if one wishes) because we ran a perceptual task. It was natural to look there. And we found an effect (of validity, an abstract rather than visual property) especially in a subpart of it, namely the fusiform gyrus (better known to process stimuli such as faces). So our observations were targetting the visual system because of our choice of a task. We deliberately did not choose a reward task with money (a considerable neuroeconomic literature bears on this, and our purpose was precisely not to add a footnote to it). We were interested in what seemed to us a more basic/primitive question, even naïve: before we enter into instrumental, rewarding relationships with monetary stimuli, we recognize them as such: how does the brain do this? That's the question we adressed, and we were lucky to have found some significant results. Now, it does not mean of course - as your comment rightly suggests - that our finding is not to locate within a broader circuitry. Precisely thisi is what we hypothesized by wanting to shed light
on one basic step of the wholer money brain-processing. Because money is not any stimulus it might have shaped the visual system in such a way that categorization occurs in a "fast and automatic" way. But the trick is precisely to see this independently of a reward task, and in areas of the brain not directly connected with reward anticipation, consumption, etc.

You raise also a deep point about indecision. When rapid categorization fails, and that the stimulus is such that the recognition/categorization system has to be fast. Precisely we developped across evolution such signal detection mechanisms that tend to give more weight to false-positive than true-negative: preferring to see a tiger when there is none, than the reverse. Precisely the brain does that from ancient times. Now why should it do it with money? That's the question.

Sacha


John McCreery said:

Sacha,

The time-pressured contexts in which Klein conducts his research may be a red herring. On the other hand, they might be taken as supporting an evolutionary explanation for why the ventral visual pathway is the locus of processes involved in high-speed recognition of similarity. 

An idea that seems to be popping up fairly frequently these days is that the brain is constantly involved in two processes, taking steps to achieve some goal and scanning for possible dangers/opportunities that may make it necessary to interrupt the current goal-oriented process and direct attention elsewhere. The model is the use of interrupts by computer operating systems, in which a program is paused while the computer checks input for higher priority instructions. The evolutionary just-so story envisions step(1) glimpsing something that may be a tiger, (2) glimpsing something that confirms "tiger", and (3) reacting instantly in a way that ensures survival. Extrapolating, it seems to me a plausible supposition that this is exactly the sort of one-back task used in your experiment and that, given the importance of visual input in scanning for possible dangers/opportunities, that the function should be located where you find it, in the ventral visual pathway. Just speculating, of course. It does raise an interesting question, though. What happens when (2) returns "not tiger"? What differentiates (3') "Safe to ignore" from (3") "Let's look more closely"?

Hi Huon,

I really like your point, because this is precisely the sort of experiments I would like to perform next. And of course I already thought of mushrooms, berries, seeds etc. which I started to collect!

I don't necessarily believe that the main finding we propose is essentially associated with money. It happens that we tested this case because I have further interests concerning money, its nature, its emergence, its cultural success, etc. But, in fact, fast and automatic categorization along a "validity/invalidity" dimensions could concern natural species as well as some cultural artifacts (money, but what else?).

To address your question more specifically, though, (and indeed it relates to John's when he raises the point of indeterminate stimuli and indecision), it is quite possible that the fusiform gyrus (I am still checking the literature on this point) automatically processes nuances in faces (nuances here in terms of harmony, see work by my friend and colleague Itzhak Aharon on this; but we should think of other dimensions, such as really human/ artificial (masks?) / animals, anthropoids, etc. creating a junction between natural and artifactual items...). The latter seems to me a project of its own. To get back to mushrooms, the idea is that certainly we have this ability to detect nuances about edibility (by running a corresponding 2x2 design: edible/non edible // familiar / unfamiliar  /// and nuances). The incorporation of nuances in the 2x2 design will help to check (see my last reply to John) whether categorization mistakes would tend to be in favor of survival or risky.

Sacha


Huon Wardle said:

Couple of points related to M.Izabel and John. There is a wider relevance here in terms of the human ability to assign semi-automatic validity not just to coins but a whole lot of other learnt cultural phenomena too. Presumably, since this location in the brain is also associated with physiological needs, there might be a similar experiment asking people to recognise 'delicious mushroom', 'tasteless slimy mushroom', 'poisonous mushroom'. Have tests of this kind been done?

Supposing we did the mushroom test would we not have to acknowledge that the validity here is also fundamentally learnt and historical in kind since knowledge of mushrooms has been learnt historically? What I am getting at is that a bit of the brain that is about physiological needs would be kind of useless if it were not plastic enough to take in many very complex nuances of value. So, I want to put in question for a moment that there is a 'basic' physiological-reward-seeking function which is then recycled for a more nuanced task. Perhaps it may be that there is nuancing all the way down so to speak. I am just wondering what you think about this issue.

Sacha, one quick thought off the top of my head. The problem with the tiger example is that we automatically imagine a tiger in a jungle. But two indisputable facts about humanity is that we occupy an enormous range of habitats and must survive infancy and childhood, during which time we are being taught about the dangers that surround us. This would suggest an evolutionary advantage for rapid response mechanisms that are trainable and, thus, adaptable to different environments. That sounds to me very much like the recycling of neuronal circuits you mention. 

What, then, could be special about money? I wonder how old your subjects are. My speculation is that if already adult, even young adult, they have already had a number of years of training in which money is singled out as sacred ("Don't touch that! It's not yours!") and potentially embarrassing, possibly dangerous, especially if you choose the wrong coins or mistake a non-coin for a coin. The neuronal circuits have been recycled, trained for an environment in which money is one of those things you are careful about. The fix is already in before your subjects enter the experiment. 

I wonder, then. Could you run your test on toddlers? Would there be any difference in the results if the stimulus weren't money?

Cheers,

John

Hi again, Sacha.  Now that I'm done reading  the money part, the title of your paper intrigues me.  When I hear or read "constrain," two synonymous words, "restrict and restrain," come to mind.  I'm very much interested in the study of corruption. Lately, I have been trying to gather reading materials regarding its evolutionary explanations that I hope to be neurobiological or, at least, psychosocial or psychocultural.

It's enlightening how you use "recycling" in a technical way.  The anthropologist in me wants to settle on "cognitive recycling" maybe due to my understanding of cognition that is complex in relation to culture.  Taking out other factors, money or the use of money is the basic anatomy of corruption. This has led me to  wonder that had there been no money (pieces of silver or coins), maybe there would be no Judas Iscariot in the literature of bribery and betrayal.

As I believe that the primitive functions of the brain do not stop in the modern times, I want to know if there is something reasonable or logical in thinking that how the ancient people viewed money or the absence of money is still apparent in contemporary culture or economy.  Here, it seems the primitive/ancient and the modern/contemporary are isomorphic.  In relation to corruption, I wonder (sorry if I wonder a lot) how the corrupt executed corruption in the old times when there was no money yet.  My hunch is that there was no bribery or extortion then when economy was centered on barter or trade.  It would be tough to conceal a breathing pig or  a sack of rice.

Going back to the title, I think only the primitive ways of man that include the functioning  of his brain  can, indeed,  restrict and restrain his modern economic activities plagued with corruption.  The use of credit cards in modern times, for example, is no different to how primitive cultures used shells and other artifacts not as money but as material representations of value or economic status of an individual.  We now have platinum cards or American Express; maybe before they had shells that were more valuable than others.   If money is abolished today, I think humans can cope up due to the fact that trade and exchange without money was one of the primitive cultural, behavioral, and economic functions of the human brain.  I don't wonder why in some rural areas in developing economies one can immediately assess the value of a real property the moment he sees it without calculators, contracts, bank policies, and fair market or zonal value advisories and turn it into a number of cattle heads.  .

 

 

Turning to my favourite topic, money. When you talk of money emergence, Sacha, do you mean the origins of money or something that is ongoing like money creation? In any case we need to know what money is and what it does. This in turn, in my view, requires a historical treatment of the topic. But I get the impression that neuroscience would rather bypass history.

I have several problems with the choice of coins as a money symbol. These are related to the focus on money as a medium of exchange. In his recent book Debt: the first 5,000 years, David Graeber argues that, from Ancient Mesopotamia for more than 2,000 years before the invention of coinage, money took the form of virtual credit or debt. Currency or money composed of precious metals (bullion) dominated during a period of imperial expansion; but the middle ages reverted to credit as the dominant form. Western imperial expansion over the last few centuries, with its reversion to a focus on currency or bullion (which influenced the founders of modern economics), may or may not be ending now. In my own work, I argue that money is both a thing and an idea, created by markets and states together. Other schools of thought, including Aglietta and Orlean, emphasize the role of sovereignty and debt in conceiving of money as a means of payment or unit of account. The liberal myth of money's origins in barter as a medium of exchange has been discredited by anthropologists since Polanyi's work of mid-century. But it remains the dominant theory of money's emergence in modern economics.

You refer to coins as being worthless today, which is largely true. But this is part of the trend towards fiat money which has seen money lose its former anchorage in a physical substance. This is partly a consequence of changes in money's technology, especially the digital revolution of the last two decades. Georg Simmel in The Philosophy of Money (1900) argues that this dematerialization of money should lead to a greater public awareness of the community of users whose social institutions actually underpin its use. Durkheim made a similar case in The Social Division of Labour. Yet today such a community is less identifiable than ever, with national monopoly currency being undermined by global money markets which apparently lack public supervision.

I mention these considerations briefly to indicate where the economic anthropology of money finds itself today, not to dismiss your experiments, but to look for bridges between your assumptions and ours. I am encouraged by your reference to the economy of conventions which suggests one such bridge. I wonder however if, by referring to money as a cultural artifact, you prefer to think of it as an object like words rather than as a whole system of communication like language. Given the importance you attach to parallel experiments on words and numbers, perhaps we ought to address some of these metaphysical issues. Is money langue or parole or both?

I believe that Huon has twice tried to raise such issues within a neo-Kantian framework, but I didn't get the impression of much interchange there. I hope that my intervention doesn't have a similar effect, since I believe our conversation so far has succeeded in getting you to clarify the experimental basis of your claims. Without seeking to divert it from that level of discussion, I would like to open up another one.

Hi John,

It would be great to run my test (or others alike) on toddlers. But I need to interject a word of caution.  Not all learning process about the use of an item, or the learnt reactions about a feature of the environment, even though it is to some extent automatized by individual brains, indicates a recycling process have taken place. It is not because something has been routinized in the individual brain that some older function has been put to a novel use. It might simply be the case that an available neural circuit has been properly activated in its proper use. I suspect that this is simply what happens with tigers, and most of your examples. It is not a matter of cultural cortical recycling. To get the latter, you have to show how some older established and functionally selected/specific neural circuit has been re-used in some unexpected context. Moreover you have to fulfill a number of criteria (automaticity is one case / but automaticity is a rather relative criterion, which depends on what your are talking about / for instance in my case it was automaticity with respect to a plausible comparison : word/not word). One of these further criteria is a finely grained and invariant location in some sub-system, which we apparently have in the fusiform gyrus. Nothing like that with fear and tigers. Nothing belonging to tigers carries over the case of money-categorization neural processing, in terms of functional characteristics, localization, etc. Of course, you suggest the reverse, and your analogy is to say that one we have categorized tiger properly (which is crucial) we can have fear or not. And that the survival constraints here, explains what we have routinized the categorization process in the first place. A sort of teleological reasoning pattern typical of evolutionary reasoning. And yes! I am incline to follow this sort of reasoning in the case of money: it may be due to the importance of money for our survival in modern economic environments that we may have automatized an older circuit (not the one associated with tiger recognition though, I think, but why not?).

It does not mean, then, that we can assert that we have found something special to money. As I insisted in many occasions when presenting these data, it is most likely that it cannot be specific to money. Hence the relevance of an experiment with toddlers and other items, categorizable along a dimension of validity and invalidity. Moreover, the general evolutionarily  teleological explanation could be checked too: is the ability to promptly classify an item along a general valid/invalid feature facilitated when stakes to do this are high, or is it independent to urgent motives (this connects better to Izabel’s comment about constraints, by the way)?

John McCreery said:

Sacha, one quick thought off the top of my head. The problem with the tiger example is that we automatically imagine a tiger in a jungle. But two indisputable facts about humanity is that we occupy an enormous range of habitats and must survive infancy and childhood, during which time we are being taught about the dangers that surround us. This would suggest an evolutionary advantage for rapid response mechanisms that are trainable and, thus, adaptable to different environments. That sounds to me very much like the recycling of neuronal circuits you mention. 

What, then, could be special about money? I wonder how old your subjects are. My speculation is that if already adult, even young adult, they have already had a number of years of training in which money is singled out as sacred ("Don't touch that! It's not yours!") and potentially embarrassing, possibly dangerous, especially if you choose the wrong coins or mistake a non-coin for a coin. The neuronal circuits have been recycled, trained for an environment in which money is one of those things you are careful about. The fix is already in before your subjects enter the experiment. 

I wonder, then. Could you run your test on toddlers? Would there be any difference in the results if the stimulus weren't money?

Cheers,

John

Hi Izabel,

I did not say (nor think but certainly wonder) much about moral implications of this study I cosigned. I am not sure in which sense money could be said to be essentially linked to corruption, at least at the level at which I study it, and to which I would like to focus as long as possible, as precisely it requires some sort of avoidance of many projections that could blur the understanding of basic features of money. At that basic level at which we seem able to recognize valid from invalid currencies, no moral interference seems to play. I keep this problem of corruption for below, as I also want to address it positively. But for the nonce, I precise what I intend to mean by “constraints”. I mean “functional constraints”, in the sense that if the cultural cortical recycling hypothesis can apply to the case I am interested in, part of the hypothesis requires that some “functional constraints” bear on the neural processing of stimuli that were typically associated with the anciently wired neural circuit dealing with those stimuli will be found again in the neural processing of the novel cultural item.  Which those constraints are in this specific case, it is too soon to say. It means functional/anatomical constraints that can be revealed in the processing of coins, for instance. Neural processings are genetically constrained in particular. Nothing to do with morality, or with any normative dimension. That’s the way I use “constrains”.

A quite different question is : “are our moral attitudes vis-à-vis money determined at a “low” neurobiological level?”. It could be related to my initial concern if it happened that there were any substantial stable interactions between moral assessment and value assessment in tasks involving moral or immoral uses of money. Some people in moral/social/economic neuroscience have dealt with this second sort of topics. But the neural anchoring of moral judgments involving money manipulation does not present the same kind of neural characteristics I pointed out, and it cannot be proved to be, given that we are not talking about the same tasks, brain areas, issues.

Yet, there could be some ways to tackle the issue you raise in a tighter way, from a neurobiological standpoint. Imagine scenes of corruption performed with dummy coins (or demontized currencies) and with real money. Would that influence our judgements? Would that affect the same areas? What kinds of judgements, processes, are involved here? It seems that monetary value plays a role; or is the moral intention? Does money corrupt because it is money, which, in a different way, seems to be your stance.  Or, is this issue of money and corruption very culturally or religiously dependent? Dependent of some typical narratives in particular religions, not all. As I am looking to basic features that belong to most human brains, I am rather seeking for traits that do not depend to particular cultural shaping but integrate in a quasi-automatic way these particular cultural traits (like monetary value) because of the implementation of a more basic, cross-cultural, neurobiological ability.

M Izabel said:

Hi again, Sacha.  Now that I'm done reading  the money part, the title of your paper intrigues me.  When I hear or read "constrain," two synonymous words, "restrict and restrain," come to mind.  I'm very much interested in the study of corruption. Lately, I have been trying to gather reading materials regarding its evolutionary explanations that I hope to be neurobiological or, at least, psychosocial or psychocultural.

It's enlightening how you use "recycling" in a technical way.  The anthropologist in me wants to settle on "cognitive recycling" maybe due to my understanding of cognition that is complex in relation to culture.  Taking out other factors, money or the use of money is the basic anatomy of corruption. This has led me to  wonder that had there been no money (pieces of silver or coins), maybe there would be no Judas Iscariot in the literature of bribery and betrayal.

As I believe that the primitive functions of the brain do not stop in the modern times, I want to know if there is something reasonable or logical in thinking that how the ancient people viewed money or the absence of money is still apparent in contemporary culture or economy.  Here, it seems the primitive/ancient and the modern/contemporary are isomorphic.  In relation to corruption, I wonder (sorry if I wonder a lot) how the corrupt executed corruption in the old times when there was no money yet.  My hunch is that there was no bribery or extortion then when economy was centered on barter or trade.  It would be tough to conceal a breathing pig or  a sack of rice.

Going back to the title, I think only the primitive ways of man that include the functioning  of his brain  can, indeed,  restrict and restrain his modern economic activities plagued with corruption.  The use of credit cards in modern times, for example, is no different to how primitive cultures used shells and other artifacts not as money but as material representations of value or economic status of an individual.  We now have platinum cards or American Express; maybe before they had shells that were more valuable than others.   If money is abolished today, I think humans can cope up due to the fact that trade and exchange without money was one of the primitive cultural, behavioral, and economic functions of the human brain.  I don't wonder why in some rural areas in developing economies one can immediately assess the value of a real property the moment he sees it without calculators, contracts, bank policies, and fair market or zonal value advisories and turn it into a number of cattle heads.  .

 

 

Money, OK!

It is a big problem for me to know which notion or role of money, if any, I have stylized, and which of these possible notions or role-candidates is reflected in our neural data. Is it store of value, of mean of exchange? Definitely not unit of account, I think. An answer to this may help to know which of rival nice heterodox conceptions of money my data would tend to support, if it can be the case. Because those heterodox views have somewhat lost track of these functional aspects (in terms of economic roles here, not in my otherwise neuroscientific use of the term, but is there a correlation between the two that I expect to show?). Your initial focus is elsewhere, on “emergence”. You urge me to disambiguate this, which I readily do; trying to avoid a trap you lay: falling into the liberal myth of a continuum between barter and monetary economics.

At first, I won’t even try to avoid the trap, but am far from sure I fall into yet. I certainly wish to connect my results (on which I think I won’t no more insist in the present and future replies as I took enough pain to explain in previous ones what they are and literally mean) to the “emergence” of some arbitrary items as media of exchange. I even plan to stylize even more my experimental setting in order to merge it with a Kiyotaki and Wright experimental setting used to show how after a few rounds of parametrized (in terms of stocking costs in particular) exchanges of some commodities, a given commodity emerge as a medium of exchange, which is an important aspect of money. I think that the credit dimension of money you refer too is captured (or can easily be in some parametrization) in this setting. I simply want to know whether individual (individual brains more than verbal responses that do not tell much in this context) recognize the monetary value one of the commodities has acquired across the rounds by means of the brain mechanism my co-authors and I documented and how it interacts with social coordination behavioral mechanisms associated with the selection and use and money.

Does it say something about the historical emergence of money? It’d be better if it would. But you will agree that it is simpler (and maybe analytically safer and more rigorous) to test ideas in stylized settings focused on simple roles and functions than to try to carry over streamlined results to reality without any precise methodology / my implicit criticism here is that I don’t know to what extent heterodox views (in fact this criticism has nothing to do with their being heterodox) such as Aglietta and Orlean’s rely on clearly analyzed data and precise background hypotheses or if it is purely speculative.

Testing a model such as Kiyotaki and Wright present the other advantage to address your question on intrinsic value of coins, since we can use either really arbitrary fiat monies, or money that have acquired value through efficient rounds of exchange without being supported by any intrinsically valuable support. Your point on Simmel suggests fascinating extensions and ramifications. If it is the case that by being disconnected from intrinsically valuable support, a collective or even individual emphasis will be put on institutions defining and supporting money, the question is to understand if he meant that we were ready to “discover” money behind its metallic, precious, intrinsically valuable materializations, and why we needed them in the first place. Now I envision an experiment in which conflicts between intrinsic value and conventional value could be implemented (with in the background the issue of “valeurs refuges”, especially meaningful, indeed, in global contexts).

Finally, this relates to your last question: money as word / money as language. Simmel refers to the latter, and this dimension is crucial in what I pretend to target. The conventional aspect of money, which I target then, is tantamount to connecting an item to a language. Or, more deeply to the a priori form of communication, universality and systematicity we may perceive as being immediately associated with a cultural item (in my case money and monetarily validity). How neuroscience can reveal those a priori forms of sociality, language, configuration of the universe (in terms of space and numbers), how these a priori forms of sensibility (which correspond to functional constraints in the brain when speaking of cultural artifacts, but to functions tout court when speaking of space and time for instance and the way brains encode them) is at the core at the neuro-anthropology project I feel associated with myself.

Keith Hart said:

Turning to my favourite topic, money. When you talk of money emergence, Sacha, do you mean the origins of money or something that is ongoing like money creation? In any case we need to know what money is and what it does. This in turn, in my view, requires a historical treatment of the topic. But I get the impression that neuroscience would rather bypass history.

I have several problems with the choice of coins as a money symbol. These are related to the focus on money as a medium of exchange. In his recent book Debt: the first 5,000 years, David Graeber argues that, from Ancient Mesopotamia for more than 2,000 years before the invention of coinage, money took the form of virtual credit or debt. Currency or money composed of precious metals (bullion) dominated during a period of imperial expansion; but the middle ages reverted to credit as the dominant form. Western imperial expansion over the last few centuries, with its reversion to a focus on currency or bullion (which influenced the founders of modern economics), may or may not be ending now. In my own work, I argue that money is both a thing and an idea, created by markets and states together. Other schools of thought, including Aglietta and Orlean, emphasize the role of sovereignty and debt in conceiving of money as a means of payment or unit of account. The liberal myth of money's origins in barter as a medium of exchange has been discredited by anthropologists since Polanyi's work of mid-century. But it remains the dominant theory of money's emergence in modern economics.

You refer to coins as being worthless today, which is largely true. But this is part of the trend towards fiat money which has seen money lose its former anchorage in a physical substance. This is partly a consequence of changes in money's technology, especially the digital revolution of the last two decades. Georg Simmel in The Philosophy of Money (1900) argues that this dematerialization of money should lead to a greater public awareness of the community of users whose social institutions actually underpin its use. Durkheim made a similar case in The Social Division of Labour. Yet today such a community is less identifiable than ever, with national monopoly currency being undermined by global money markets which apparently lack public supervision.

I mention these considerations briefly to indicate where the economic anthropology of money finds itself today, not to dismiss your experiments, but to look for bridges between your assumptions and ours. I am encouraged by your reference to the economy of conventions which suggests one such bridge. I wonder however if, by referring to money as a cultural artifact, you prefer to think of it as an object like words rather than as a whole system of communication like language. Given the importance you attach to parallel experiments on words and numbers, perhaps we ought to address some of these metaphysical issues. Is money langue or parole or both?

I believe that Huon has twice tried to raise such issues within a neo-Kantian framework, but I didn't get the impression of much interchange there. I hope that my intervention doesn't have a similar effect, since I believe our conversation so far has succeeded in getting you to clarify the experimental basis of your claims. Without seeking to divert it from that level of discussion, I would like to open up another one.

I really find this interesting:

"How neuroscience can reveal those a priori forms of sociality, language, configuration of the universe (in terms of space and numbers), how these a priori forms of sensibility (which correspond to functional constraints in the brain when speaking of cultural artifacts, but to functions tout court when speaking of space and time for instance and the way brains encode them) is at the core at the neuro-anthropology project I feel associated with myself."


The MIT Learning and Memory group led by Earl Miller came out with a study about the "primitive brain" being smarter than we think.  The group concluded that in the process of learning, the striatum of the basal ganglia had more rapid change than the prefrontal cortex that slowly absorbs what is learned.  Forgive me if my memory of what I read in  a science magazine years ago fails me.


The roles of basal ganglia include eye movement, retinotopy or spatial organization, motor control, and motivation in behavior.  Wikipedia has the following as the functions of the cortex:

"This brain region has been implicated in planning complex cognitive behaviors, personality expression, decision making and moderating correct social behavior.[1] The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals.[2]"

My understanding is that this is the reverse of the common notion that we learn the rules or ideas first before the stimulus or artifacts.  One has to stop on red because that's the rule.  For someone who does not know the rule, the first learning experience is the visual mapping of a stimulus or the spatial observation of an artifact before the rule or idea.  Another good example is observing and eating a Fuji apple and realizing that since it looks and tastes like a Washington Delicious that I have tasted before, therefore it is an apple.  I find this reverse process interesting in the study of language and meaning in relation to behavior and cognition, but I cannot really think of its simple application outside of neurolinguistics or psycholinguistics.

I find the primitive brain/mind/mentality of Levy-Bruhl more suited in a culture-centered anthropology.  The amygdala being primitive and emotional and the neocortex being logical can be an evolutionary model  we can use  in tracing the emergence of myths and rituals and even church and religion.  I also find the model useful in understanding the transition of exchange from the primitive economy (barter/trade/credit without money)  to the use of money.  In primitive exchange, the concept of profit is not well developed.  I used "is" because there are still cultures that engage in barter and trade without using money and without thinking about profits but deals.  A profit is logical while a deal is emotional.  

Back home in the Philippines, a farmer,  for example, trades his four-pound chicken with his neighbor's worn shirt.  He does not  think of numbers or costs.  The question he thinks of is whether it is a good deal.  This is where visual mapping and motivation come first.  Is the shirt still wearable?  How about its color and design?  Does it look good on me?  These are questions usually asked by emotional shoppers.  Logical shoppers calculate and think how he can save.  The interesting point in this example is why the farmer can easily trade his chicken for a shirt since he can sell it and by a new  shirt.  The answer, I think, is his culture that is more emotional than logical.  Besides, dealing with his neighbor is more  personal than with a merchant in the next town who does not even know him.                


Sacha, I have found all your responses very helpful. Thanks. I wanted to press a few points. To me what is very interesting is the general finding that a synthetic object - call it 'coin validity' - can be registered nearly immediately by the brain; or perhaps the central difference "valid coin/non-valid coin" can be registered in this way; I am not sure which is the better way of putting it. Actually, the fact that it is coins is rather irrelevant except that we can dispose of some crude ideas and replace them with a nuanced historical-social view of what is going on. What is helpful here is the recognition that synthetic objects of that kind are very immediate and real and that our world is made up of potentially an infinite number of these objects.

I want to push a couple of points to see what you think. First, I don't think the results are showing us a priori processes in the sense that you can point to a bit of the brain and say 'look; that is what is generating this'. the scans and electrical measurements are showing that recognition has taken place at a certain speed and is connected to a location in the brain,  but not more than that. But that is interesting in itself. Then there is the interesting link with a part of the brain associated with physiological needs.

Minimally, we would note that the entire brain is required to know about money. Obviously, money is not just coins and of course, a blind person can recognise money and money-use quite effectively; so it is not just about visual perception. Based on the recycling idea, is there any evidence that, e.g., if that part of the brain is damaged then people's recognition of coins or perhaps use of money is then impaired?

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