Neuroeconomics
An interactive 3D brain dedicated solely to the neural systems behind decision making.
Overview
I was drawn to neuroeconomics by the way it combines neuroscience and economics, two disciplines I had until then studied separately. The methodology behind the field interested me as much as its findings, and so did the implication that a resource rational idea of the brain serves as a reasonable explanation as to how and why we make some of the decisions we do.
I also enjoy learning about brain anatomy, so this project was an attempt to combine the two. Interactive brain atlases already existed online, but none were dedicated solely to the neural systems behind decision making, which is the gap this one tries to fill.
Brain
Building It
The brain model was sculpted and segmented in Blender and rendered in the browser with Three.js, with TypeScript connecting the scene to the interface. Selecting a region brings up the role it plays in valuation and choice and how it relates to the systems around it.
The project was shaped by restraint more than anything else, since the aim was to show only the regions with an established role in decision making rather than to reproduce a full anatomical atlas that already exists elsewhere.
Amygdala
Beyond the Usual Regions
Some regions included here, the hippocampus among them, are not the ones neuroeconomics tends to focus on, but I thought they belonged because they still shape the choices we make. The hippocampus stores and retrieves memories of past outcomes, and when we come to value an option we draw on those memories to estimate what it is likely to be worth.
Valuation, on this reading, is not a calculation made fresh each time. It leans on what we remember of similar situations, which means memory is part of the machinery of choice rather than something separate from it. Leaving those regions out would have made the map tidier but less honest about how decisions are actually put together.
Hippocampus
Built with
- TypeScript
- Three.js
- Blender
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