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The dance of the nucleus accumbens and the insula

I haven’t been to a fortune teller since the time I let a nascent, ultimately unsuccessful, girlfriend talk me into squandering twenty bucks on one in a funky, hippie, rundown corner of San Francisco.
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I haven’t been to a fortune teller since the time I let a nascent, ultimately unsuccessful, girlfriend talk me into squandering twenty bucks on one in a funky, hippie, rundown corner of San Francisco. Frankly, I’m happy to remain blissfully ignorant about the future. If you believe one of the architectural tenets of science fiction — or is that Christianity — there’s nothing you can really do about the future anyway. And if, by some miracle or twist of plot, you actually did manage to change the future, well, everything would change and all humanity might be transformed into pus-eating microbes or something even less evolved… compassionate conservatives perhaps.

But if there is one thing about which I am certain, futurewise, it’s that my nucleus accumbens is about to lay a beatin’ on my insula that’ll leave me dazed and confused and suffering from a raging case of post-purchase dissonance so severe it’ll make the worst hangover I’ve ever had seem like a fond memory.

I only recently discovered I had a nucleus accumbens. Don’t laugh, you have one too. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. But it’ll take an MRI machine to see it. It’s a region of the brain loaded with dopamine receptors that get all excited whenever we experience, or even anticipate experiencing, something pleasant. Think cold beer after a hot bike ride, new skis on opening day, 60cm of white smoke powder on your birthday. All those things make your nucleus accumbens dance like a drunken sailor on VE day.

The insula is another region of the brain, a neighbourhood of very prim homes with painfully manicured lawns and not a speck of graffiti or litter, certainly no dog poop on the sidewalks. It’s the part of the brain that gets switched on when you smell something gross, believe the guy you just called a pussy at the bar is about to wipe the floor with you or turn on the television and discover George Bush is lying, er, addressing the nation on every channel in the 500 channel universe at the exact moment you want to chill on the couch.

Brain scientists have known about the nucleus accumbens and the insula for long enough now that they’ve finally begun to figure out how the two dance together. They’ve known about them long enough that they’ve even reached out and embraced other scientific and pseudo-scientific disciplines to understand how these two areas of the brain fight each other like cats and dogs when it comes to the life-defining task of shopping. Yes, shopping.

Whatever we might think of shopping — and we think shopping is as close as one can come to hell on earth — it is, at an individual level, pretty much the thing that separates Them from Us, poor from rich, primitive from modern, east from west, south from north, etc. Shopping has even been touted, both south of the border and in this country, as one’s patriotic duty in times of war or economic distress. Shopping is freedom, or so it seems.

Being a freedom-loving guy, that equation brings me untold distress. I hate shopping. One of the reasons I live in Whistler is because I hate shopping almost as much as I like skiing. I rarely have to shop for anything other than groceries here. People give me stuff. They give me clothes, for example. They give me clothes to work in, clothes for volunteering, clothes because they want to get their company’s name walking around town, clothes because we’ve all grown accustomed to getting free clothes and if we stopped getting them it might undermine the social fabric of the town. Gratuitous pun.

People leave town and give me stereos they don’t want to lug around any more, furniture they can’t move, skis they know I’ll use or pass on… stuff. Publishers send me books, DVDs, even, belatedly, cheques for work I’ve done for them. Manufacturers send me various tchotchkes — this week’s new word in case you’re keeping track of my resolution — related to skiing in the hopes I’ll find an unobtrusive way to plug them in print. Every now and then, I score big and someone sends me new skis or boots or bindings, something really useful.

The list of what I’ve had to buy since I moved here mostly consists of Levi’s, computers, cameras, and a car or two. I like to think most of those things are business expenses. It makes Whistler almost affordable but my insula worries occasionally about whether Revenue Canada agrees with me.

This relatively shoppingless life is about to take a nasty turn for the worse. That it might all work out for the better is, right now, lost in the fog of war between my nucleus accumbens and my insula.

Behaviourial economists — those are economists who live somewhat in the real world, as opposed to economists most of us who had to take Economics 101 were forced to read — psychologists and brainiacs teamed up at Stanford University to take a look inside shoppers’ brains when they make purchase decisions. They found hard, scientific evidence of a battle that rages between these brain areas in the never-ending war between Tightwads and Spendthrifts.

The Tightwad-Spendthrift Scale was postulated by behavioural economists at Carnegie Mellon University based on extensive surveys of shoppers. Like all good two-dimensional scales it tried to array people along a continuum, tightwads on one end, spendthrifts on the other.

To make a long story short — if you want to read the long story, pick up a copy of the January 4 issue of the journal Neuron — when you see something you want to buy, your nucleus accumbens lights up like crazy. Spendthrifts have a nucleus accumbens that looks like a Grateful Dead lightshow. When the price seems too high, the insula kicks in. Tightwads have an insula that’s Bruce Lee on steroids.

The date for my Perfect Partner and me to move into a new WHA home is drawing near. We have, between us, zero furniture. The new home comes with none. We have to get our act in gear.

Despite my loathing of shopping, I like to make the task as painless as possible. For me, that means buying the first thing I like that’ll do the task, for example, giving me a table to eat at and chairs to sit on while I eat. I don’t care how much it costs. My nucleus accumbens kicks ass on my insula.

My Perfect Partner has a well-developed insula. Hers is the Anna Nicole of insulas… only still alive and kicking. Her insula is the only reason I’m not getting frantic phone calls from the banks that issue my credit cards.

So far, it’s saved me enough to, well, to furnish a home… assuming we’ll ever be able to reach agreement. In the meantime, anybody out there with furniture they don’t need, let me know.