Elf Sternberg

"Whenever my will to live gets too strong, I read Peter Watts." Thus wrote james_nicoll several months ago while commenting on the book Blindsight. I've been re-reading Blindsight and man, that is truly one of the most depressing, best-written first-contact novels I've ever read, it truly sends shivers up my spine every time I read it.

Because what Blindsight is mostly about is the jury-rigged all-sorta-moving-in-the-same-direction collection of just barely functioning mental parts that is human consciousness, about all the funny hacks and gaps and holes in our consciousness that exist to be exploited or avoided.

I thought of Blindsight and Siri Keeton, the main character, today when Jonah Lehrer wrote:

one of the reasons credit cards are such a popular form of debt is that they take advantage of some innate flaws in the brain. When we buy something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss - our wallet is literally lighter. Credit cards, however, make the transaction abstract, so that we don't really feel the downside of spending money. Brain imaging experiments suggest that paying with credit cards actually reduces activity in the insula, a brain region associated with negative feelings. As George Loewenstein, a neuroeconomist at Carnegie-Mellon says, "The nature of credit cards ensures that your brain is anaesthetized against the pain of payment." Spending money doesn't feel bad, so you spend more money.

Now, credit cards have some other incentives that justify their use: if you're willing to trade your privacy to corporations for the convenience of your own tracking, you also get the government's promise that you won't be on the hook for more than the first fifty bucks if someone steals your wallet. Which, by the way, allows you to justify using the credit card, and racking up credit charges, instead of using cash.

Which makes me wonder if I should switch to using only cash under almost all circumstances. Or find some way to make using credit hurt. Because, the funny thing is, Omaha insists that I take every receipt, carry it with me, and enter it into our household accounting software. And that's the only pain I face, but it's a pain suffered by someone else, the Elf of next week. I wonder how I could make it more immanent.

I wonder if it would even matter.

Original paper: Neural Predictors of Purchase.