The Neuro Revolution is a new book by Zack Lynch that looks at how our increasing knowledge about how the brain works will impact everything from economics and politics to religion and, of course, marketing. h+ recently interviewed Lynch about how neuroscience may someday be applied to our daily lives. From h+:
h+: Supercomputers are now faster at leveraging trading positions than humans (this is creating a quite a controversy on Wall Street). What role do you see for human neurofinance and neuroeconomics in the financial markets as artificial intelligence continues to gain more sophistication?
ZL: The technology of each previous revolution is required for the succeeding revolution. We couldn’t have had the industrial revolution without the agricultural revolution, because we wouldn’t have had the specialization of labor that was required for humans to have the wealth and time to be able to develop industrial technologies. We couldn’t have had information technologies prior to industrial technology. In the same way, we couldn’t have had neurotechnology without the development of information technology – and without its continued development. These are enabling technologies that will continue to develop, and that will support the evolution of more sophisticated neurotechnologies.
If we’re talking about specific technologies that will be available to financial traders, one will be neurosoftware applications that will help retrain the brain of financial traders to reduce the human tendency to overestimate. That will require a quite sophisticated understanding of the human neurobiology of decision making. That — in and of itself –will require computational models that are just beginning to be worked out.
This is Your Brain on Neurotechnology (h+)
The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World (Amazon)