Montague P Read
Department of Neurosciences, Computational Psychiatry Unit, Bayor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
Funct Neurol. 2007 Oct-Dec;22(4):219-34.
All choices are economic decisions, and this is true because mobile organisms run on batteries. For them the clock is always ticking and their battery draining so every moment represents a choice of how to invest a bit of energy. From this perspective, all choices - those made and those not made - engender costs and yield variable future returns. There is no more fundamental stricture for an organism than to behave so as to recharge their batteries; consequently, each moment of existence is attended by the need to value that moment and its near-term future quickly and accurately. The central issue of neuroeconomics is valuation - the way the brain values literally everything from internal mental states to experienced time (the neuroscience part), and why it should do so one way and not another (the normative economics part). All these valuations have now begun to be probed in experiments by pairing quantitative behavioral and computational modeling with neuroimaging or neurophysiological experiments.
所有的选择都是经济决策，之所以如此，是因为移动生物依靠能量运行。对它们来说，时间在不断流逝，能量也在不断消耗，所以每一刻都代表着如何投入一点能量的选择。从这个角度来看，所有的选择——无论是做出的还是未做出的——都会产生成本，并带来不同的未来回报。对于一个生物体来说，没有比通过某种行为来为自身补充能量更基本的约束了；因此，存在的每一刻都伴随着快速而准确地评估这一刻及其近期未来的需求。神经经济学的核心问题是估值——大脑从内部心理状态到经历的时间对所有事物进行估值的方式（神经科学部分），以及为什么它应该以这种方式而不是另一种方式进行估值（规范经济学部分）。现在，通过将定量行为和计算建模与神经成像或神经生理学实验相结合，所有这些估值都已开始在实验中进行探究。
