Brain SEEKING Circuitry in Neuroeconomics: A Unifying Hypothesis for the Role of Dopamine-Energized Arousal of the Medial Forebrain Bundle in Enthusiasm-Guiding Decision-Making

Abstract

Affective shifts are critical factors in our decision-making with respect to all our survival concerns, including high cognitive ones such as those related to our economic investments and divestments. A critical emotional system, not commonly considered in neuroeconomics, is our primary process subcortical SEEKING system that regulates our exploratory-investigatory urges, including the eager anticipations of our higher mental processes. In economic decision-making, our SEEKING urge motivates us to consider the diverse opportunities and risks that are inherent in life-supportive decision-making. This state of mind, at normal levels of activity, energizes focus on cognitive details that can promote opportunities for success as well as avoid costly mistakes. However, excessive activity in this system may also promote faulty (addictive?) decision-making that is common in gambling, when hopes outweigh consideration of risks (as might be mediated by the cognitive representatives of FEAR and PANIC system). It is well known that all drug addictions are mediated by the feelings of euphoria that the SEEKING system can promote. Clearly, the ancient emotional systems of the brain need to be considered as motivators of neuroeconomic decisions, but they also need to be understood as primal motivations which need to be disciplined by higher decision-making capacities that emerge developmentally as a function of the losses and gains that have resulted from the vicissitudes of living in at times predictable but also unpredictable social (and physical) worlds. Without developmentally emergent cognitive discipline, the SEEKING system can promote delusional thinking.