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Do you find it hard to make d ecisions ? I don't.  I make them quickly.  But sometimes, I regret them. Now a new study says penny-wise, pound-foolish ones are explained by neurons' firing in our brains, according to newswise.com. Spending decisions are influenced by adaptation in neural circuits. Say what? It's all trying to say that the  study suggests that being penny wise and pound foolish is not so much a failure of judgment as it is a function of how our brains tally the value of objects that vary widely in worth. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that when monkeys are faced with a choice between two options, the firing of neurons activated in the brain adjusts to reflect the enormity of the decision. Such an approach would explain why the same person can see 20 cents as a lot one moment and $5,000 as a little the next, the researchers said. “Everybody recognizes this behavior, because everybody does ...

It's the Christmas season and materialism is rearing its ugly head. According to two psychologists who studied the subject, materialism tends to be associated with treating others in more competitive, manipulative and selfish ways, as well as with being less empathetic. It 's associated with people making a lot of money and being able to buy a lot of things.  And did you know that TV makes us more materialistic? "Research shows two sets of factors that lead people to have materialistic values," says Tim Kasser, Ph.D., a professor of psychology Knox College in Galesburg, IL. "First, people are more materialistic when they are exposed to messages that suggest such pursuits are important, whether through their parents and friends, society, or the media. Second, and somewhat less obvious -- people are more materialistic when they feel insecure or threatened, whether because of rejection, economic fears, or thoughts of their own death,"  I have a s...

OK.  So do you really know how many calories are in that pomegranate soda?  Mary Clare Jalonick writes that up until now, it's been hard for the government to keep up with all the new foods -- and their nutritional content -- that are constantly streaming into the marketplace. But the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill is hoping to put a stop to that by creating a ginormous map of what Americans are buying and eating, according to Jalonick. Chocolate milk has long interested researchers because, though the government lists chocolate milk with 2% milk as one unit, the UNC group, using scanners from grocery stores and other commercial data "founds thousands of different brands and variations of 2% chocolate milk and averaged them out, Jalonick reports. What they found was that this wasn't just happening with chocolate milk, it was pretty much occurring with every food product.  Can you imagine making sense of all that, enough to truly have accurate cal...