ABSTRACT
Collaborative research between cognitive neuroscientists and economists is producing a new interdisciplinary field called Neuroeconomics (Camerer, Loewenstein, & Prelec, 2005; Glimcher, 2002b; McCabe, 2002). The beginnings of neuroeconomics can be found in economist Friedrich von Hayek's (1952) work on the emergence of sensory (or mental) order from brain activity, and its implications for understanding the emergent extended (or socioeconomic) order found in economic activity, and in neuroscientist Donald Hebb's (1949) theories of how the brain could in fact classify and organize information through Hebbian learning, cell assembly by mutual firing, and the sequential firing of cell assemblies. von Hayek, who was influenced strongly by the growing support among neuroscientists for the neuronal doctrine, argues that the human mind emerges from the general problem the brain faces of classifying and organizing information. What von Hayek calls the sensory order was seen as a dynamic interaction between perception and memory that results in the development of representational and processing networks producing both intentional and unintentional behavior. LeDoux (2002) provides an up-to-date explanation of the neuronal theory or how synaptic connections can lead to sensory order, or the emergence of self. For LeDoux, the self emerges through the plasticity of both the autonomous activity of bottom-up synaptic connections and the conscious activity of top-down synaptic arbitration and control.
