Pykett 2012

Journal of Economic Geography Advance Access published December 10, 2012
Journal of Economic Geography (2012) pp. 1–25 doi:10.1093/jeg/lbs039
Neurocapitalism and the new neuros:

using neuroeconomics, behavioural economics
and picoeconomics for public policy
Jessica Pykett
School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston,
Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK. email 5j.pykett@bham.ac.uk4
Downloaded from http://joeg.oxfordjournals.org/ at Acq/Serials Dept-Periodicals on January 16, 2013

Abstract
Neuroeconomics, behavioural economics and picoeconomics have recently come to
widespread popular attention, informing both public policy and commercial applications
in UK and USA in particular. From neuroeducation and neuromarketing to so-called
‘nudge’-inspired public policies, the resurgence of broadly behavioural accounts of
economic theory has far-reaching consequences for how we both understand and
intervene in human rationality. While economic geographers have long been engaged
with behavioural concerns, the economic foundations of more recent ‘behaviour
change’ initiatives remain to be fully interrogated. This article provides a critical review
of these developments in economics and outlines concerns posed for a geographical
analysis of new economic knowledges, methods and subjects.
Key words: Neuroscience, biological determinism, behaviouralism, policymaking

JEL classifications: A12, DO3, D87, I38
Date submitted: 28 June 2011 Date accepted: 28 September 2012
1. Introduction
Several disciplinary developments within economics have become commonplace in
contemporary accounts of human decision-making, individual behaviour and social
interaction. These include insights from a new discipline of neuroeconomics, a more
established field of behavioural economics and a relatively unfamiliar set of ideas
named picoeconomics. Popular economics titles such as Sway (Brafman and Brafman,
2008), The Economic Naturalist: Why Economics Explains Almost Everything (Frank,
2008) and Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner, 2005) translate these ideas into bitesize
psychological, neuroscientific and behavioural insights which are revered in their
explanatory power of contemporary (capitalist) societies. Such accounts are often
picked up by media commentators in the search not just for economic explanation, but
for an understanding of the human condition itself. This is important insofar as this
trend marginalizes alternative ways of knowing economic worlds and produces new
conceptions of the post-rational human subject. Crucially, claims made by the new
neuros to have already resolved the question of human consciousness need to be
challenged.
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2 of 25 . Pykett
One does not have to look far for examples of the influence of these novel approaches
in various fields of social practice—most obviously in public policymaking, marketing
and education. The influence of behavioural economics-inspired Nudge (Thaler and
Sunstein, 2008) in recent UK public policymaking has been well documented (Jones
et al., 2011a), and in France, a neuroeconomist, Olivier Ouillier (or self-styled
‘emorational behavioural and brain scientist’, see http://www.emorationality.com/) has
advised the Centre d’analyse strate´gique (2010) on the use of neuroscientific insights to
inform the French government’s public health strategy. There is also a fledgling interest
in the use of picoeconomics to inform approaches to tackling problem gambling
(e.g. Ross et al., 2008). Neuroscientific insights are now regarded as crucial to the
development of learning theories and educational research, with major research

programmes being funded both in the UK and USA in the emerging field of
neuroeducation (Hardiman et al., 2009; Howard-Jones, no date). Finally, and unsur-
prisingly, such novel economic knowledges are also being deployed in the commercial
sector, within the world of neuromarketing, with new companies offering bespoke
‘neuro-informatics’; market research based on electroencephalography (EEG) data of
variables such as persuasion, novelty and product awareness (e.g. Neurofocus, Mindlab
International Ltd., Synergon Consulting). This trend is evidenced by yet more popular
paperback titles published, for instance Your Money and Your Brain (Zweig, 2007), The
Buying Brain (Pradeep, 2010) and Neuroweb Design (Weinschenk, 2009).
This article considers the nascent interest in these self-proclaimed novel economic
insights within economic geography and human geography more generally. A set of
philosophical and political concerns are raised which will be of core interest to an
economic geography of what could be termed ‘neurocapitalism’. These concerns are
3-fold. The first is to question the existence and characteristics of something called
neurocapitalism as an object of enquiry and to examine its broader popularization in
public policy making. The second draws attention to the behavioural assumptions of a
turn to neuroscientific explanations of human action—challenging the certainty with
which appeals to brain functioning and behaviour are made by policy strategists. The
third considers questions of reductionism and biological determinism in these
self-appointed ‘new’ ways of knowing (economic) worlds—highlighting some of the
dangers associated with these standpoints when it comes to designing policies focused
on ‘irrational’ economic behaviours. By connecting these concerns, it is my intention to
show how the new neuros have begun to provide us with popular understandings of the
post-rational human subject. Where these understandings are utilized in public policy
making, there is a positive feedback effect, with the potential to suffuse neurocapitalism
through our social worlds.
In identifying these concerns, the article aims to make the case for more critical
engagement of geographers with the general notion of neurocapitalism and the
knowledges that underpin it. Specifically, it is argued that ‘evolutionary’ approaches to
economic geography which might otherwise provide fruitful analysis of neurocapitalism
are misguided in their enthusiasm for these neuro knowledges and thus fundamentally
foreclose political criticism. By interrogating the novelty of the new neuros,
investigating their coherence and unpacking the relationship they imply between
biology and economics, attention is drawn to research from both within economic
geography and from the wider discipline which has the potential to shed new light on
what is politically at stake when public policy makers use these neuro knowledges in
order to tackle ‘irrational’ economic behaviours in a range of social spheres.
Neurocapitalism and the new neuros . 3 of 25
The article proceeds as follows: Section 2 provides an introductory overview of the

three fields of neuroeconomics, behavioural economics and picoeconomics, specifically
with regards to their methodologies, approaches to knowledge and accounts of
economic decision-making and human subjects. Distinctions and similarities between
‘the new neuros’ are identified and care is taken not to generalize where clear
epistemological, methodological and ontological differences remain, nor to accept their
own claims to novelty1. The political implications associated with governing ‘systematic
irrationality’ are then outlined. The third section explores attention paid thus far by
economic geographers to the fields of neuroeconomics and behavioural economics
(there has been no explicit attention paid to picoeconomics within human geography, to

my knowledge). This section also evaluates the critical purchase of cultural and political
geographies to understanding the significance of these new neuros, making suggestions
for a more politically and philosophically engaged dialogue on this topic within the
wider discipline of human geography. The final section takes this dialogue forward
through the concerns of neurological capitalism, behaviouralism and biological
determinism identified earlier. This final section expands on the central issue of the
article which is the unresolved question of how knowledges about the world shape our
sense of rationality, in turn shaping our social worlds2.
2. The new neuros: a critical review

Appeals to the brain sciences for sociological, philosophical, economic and political
explanation are becoming commonplace and the disciplines of neuroeconomics,
picoeconomics and behavioural economics are increasingly important in mobilizing a
scientific rationale for such explanations. Neuroeconomics refers to the use of
neuroscientific techniques for understanding economic decision-making and is a term
said to be coined in 2001 at a conference held by the Gruter Foundation of Law at
Princeton University, when the Society for Neuroeconomics was established (Glimcher
et al., 2009, 8). Its roots are found both within the judgement and the decision-making
theories of Tversky and Kahneman (1974) and the experimental methodologies of
cognitive neuroscience. Picoeconomics refers to a ‘micro–micro’ economic approach
(Ainslie, 1992, xiii) which considers the intra-psychic conflict within a person’s
decision-making, taking into account an ‘individual’s finite behavioural capacity’ and
proclivity for non-consistent preferences. Despite sharing a core interest in concepts
such as ‘hyperbolic discounting’, this small field has evolved somewhat in parallel with
behavioural economics and key distinctions remain, as I will go on to explain.
Behavioural Economics has a much longer history which can be traced back to the
pioneering work of Simon (1945) and is generally more widely established as a
discipline. There are long-standing research institutes and indeed a Nobel Prize winner;
Daniel Kahneman won the award in 2002 for his research with Amos Tversky at the
intersections of psychology and economics undertaken since the 1970s.
But the significance of these disciplinary trajectories is not ‘merely’ academic.
Popular culture is now taking a keen interest in engaging with the implications of an era
1 That said, the term ‘new neuros’ is sometimes used as a short hand for saying ‘neuroeconomics,
behavioural economics and picoeconomics’, to avoid cumbersome sentences.
2 Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for helping me to express this point more clearly.
4 of 25 . Pykett
designated as the ‘Decade of the Brain’ during the 1990s and it is this popularization of
the new neuros with which this article is primarily concerned. The neurosciences have a
far longer history (see Changeux, 1985; Abi-Rached and Rose, 2010) with different
national experiences. In UK, the past decade has seen the neurosciences come to
fruition in terms of what are usually termed ‘insights’, applications of, or repercussions
for social, political or economic practice. The UK government, for instance, now has a
Behavioural Insights Team at the Cabinet Office (2010, 11; 2011a, 12), whose strategies
for energy citizenship, health policy and for consumer empowerment draw on
wide-ranging behavioural economics research on, for example, ‘hyperbolic discounting’
and ‘information asymmetry’, respectively. Before its demise in 2010, the Central Office
for Information also explored the potential of a neuroscientific approach to

government-led social marketing (Beattie, 2008). Interest does not stop with policy
makers; in a recent high-profile piece of research published in Current Biology, actor
Colin Firth and co-authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans
to show how the brain structures of political liberals and conservatives differed (Kanai
et al., 2011).
Table 1 provides a summary of some examples of the different disciplines,
applications and critiques or qualifications to mainstream neuroscience which make
up the intellectual scene of ‘new neuros’. Though by no means exhaustive, this gives
some indication of the diversity of disciplinary, practical and indeed ‘epistemic cultures’
(Knorr-Cetina, 1999) within the realm of broadly brain-inspired thinking. The term
‘neuro knowledges’ is used to denote formalized disciplines with their own literatures,
research institutes, journals and cadres of professors. Slippage between the categories is
also apparent. It should be noted that neuroscience itself is regarded by some as an
application of new technologies to more traditional cognitive psychological models and
theories, while neuroeconomics is often thought of as a distinct discipline rather than
merely a novel application of the neuroscientific method to economic problems. The
article will go on to explore the nature of some of these distinctions in further detail in
order to ask what is culturally and politically at stake in popular appeals to the new
neuros. The increasingly prominent application and popularization of neuro know-
ledges provides the impulse for this article, with critical approaches considered in detail
in the following sections. A core aspect of the new neuros is their close and sometimes
complex relationship with economic theory, on which this section elaborates before
looking specifically at what this might indicate for specific debates within economic
geography in Section 3.
It is sensible to begin with the most recent development of what has elsewhere been
termed ‘the young field’ of neuroeconomics (Schüll and Zaloom, 2011, 515).
Neuroeconomics uses neuroscientific methods such as EEG, which measures electrical
impulses in the brain, fMRI scanning technologies which visualize blood flows as they
differ from the resting state brain, hormonal measurements in the blood and skin
conductance measurements which measure states of psychological arousal. In addition,
experimental methods such as pre- and post-test measurements, questionnaires, visual
stimuli, game theory scenarios or dilemmas are often used. Neuroeconomics has been
variously defined as ‘the study of how the brain makes economic decisions’ (Houser and
McCabe, 2008, xv); ‘the use of cognitive and brain sciences to uncover the dynamics
underlying economic decision making’ (Basso et al., 2010, 217), the bringing together of
economic theory with the empirical methods of neurobiology (Politser, 2008, 3) or even
a challenge to common constructs of economics (Camerer et al., 2005, 31). Glimcher
Table 1. Examples of ‘the new neuros’: knowledges, applications and critiques/qualifications
Neuro knowledges Applications Critical approaches/qualifications
Neurochemistry Neuroeducation Neurosexism

Neurobiology Neuromarketing Critical Neuroscience
Neurophysiology Neuroeconomics Social and Cultural Neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience Public health policy (Cultural) Philosophy of Science
Picoeconomics Pensions and savings policy Critical Psychology
Behavioural economics Social marketing Neuroethics
Emotion science Fiscal regulation Neuroliberalism

(2004), often credited with coining the term neuroeconomics, sees its main role as to—
‘use the insights of econ theory in the study of behaviour, brain and mind’.
Already we stumble upon a crucial question for neuroeconomics: is it the application
of neurobiological insights to economic theory or is it in fact the application of
economic models to neurobiological empirics? Which is the direction of disciplinary
travel here? And is there really anything new about the bringing together of biological
science and economics to challenge our assumptions of human decision-making? One of
the central claims of neuroeconomics is that Homo Economicus is no more than an
outmoded and parsimonious fantasy of economic modelling, but in other respects,
neuroeconomics does not challenge important modes of economistic thinking. As
Glimcher (2004, 336), an expert in the choice behaviours of monkeys notes, ‘economics
is a biological science. It is the study of how humans choose’. In this sense,
neuroeconomists may not simply be using new neuroscientific insights and methods to
improve and refine economic theory; instead, they begin with an economic model of
individual behaviour which may not challenge classical utility-maximizing accounts of
human decision-making after all. Let us turn then to the specifics of the relationship
engendered between biological and economic thinking within the new neuros. To this
end, the following sections highlight the continuities (Section 2.1) and distinctions
(Section 2.2) between the three sub-disciplines, arguing that contrary to popular
perceptions of these fields, they fail to fully deconstruct the neoclassical figure of Homo
Economicus. This has specific implications for how public policy makers conceive of
(and in turn, construct) irrational economic behaviours (Section 2.3).
2.1. Continuities within neuro knowledges: emorational human

The apparent demise of Homo Economicus is a subject given extensive treatment in
nearly all of the existing literature on neuroeconomics and provides an important
continuity between neuroeconomics, behavioural economics and picoeconomics
(although there are some important distinctions as I shall go on to explain). Pointing
out the naı̈ve simplification of rational economic man is also the principal focal point of
much of the literature which has popularized applications of the new neuros.
The problematization of human rationality has a long precedent, with Simon’s (1955)
work on the bounded nature of rationality often cited as the precursor to the later
establishment of behavioural economics. Simon showed that people make best-fit or
‘satisficing’ decisions in contexts in which access to information is necessarily limited.
6 of 25 . Pykett
This observation was extended in the work of Tversky and Kahneman (1982) on
judgement and decision-making, which identified the importance of subjective heuristic
rules or biases applied to decision-making in situations of uncertainty, as opposed to a
probabilistic or computational model assumed by neoclassical economists. These
heuristics, relating to misrepresentations of probabilities and chance—relying on the
most available or plausible clues as to the likelihood of something happening or
mistakenly ‘anchoring’ one’s judgements to questionable starting points—lead pre-
dominantly to making systematic errors of judgement which fundamentally challenge
the notion of the ‘idealized person’ (Tversky and Kahneman, 1982, 19). Elsewhere, it
has been argued that such heuristics are actually an efficient, accurate and sensible

means by which people make decisions in the absence of full information and under
conditions of uncertainty, leading Girgerenzer and Brighton (2009, 107) to find value in
the personage of Homo Heuristicus.
Picoeconomics also appears to share this ambition to reclaim the cognitive
complexity of human decision-making from the oversimplified model favoured by
mainstream economists. Picoeconomics’ approach to intra psychic conflict is informed
by Freud’s psychoanalysis and Thomas Shelling’s bargaining theory. George Ainslie
identifies not utility-maximizing, but self-defeating behaviours which he regards as
particularly dangerous in terms of undermining both ourselves and our world. He states
both that ‘we are endangered by our own wishes’ and that ‘as our power to shape the
world increases, so does our dangerousness’ (Ainslie, 1992, xii). Here, the internal
psychology of the person is again reframed in economic terms, as ‘an economic
marketplace within the individual’. This is a notion shared by Ross et al.’s (2008),
Midbrain Mutiny which explores in more detail the intersections between picoeco-
nomics, neuroeconomics and behavioural economics and their specific implications for
understanding disordered gambling and addiction. For the authors, a neuroscientific
approach is useful because ‘the brain, like an economy, is a parallel processor of
information in which units compete and cooperate for scarce resources’ (Ross et al.,
2008, 12). This corroborates the understanding of human reasoning as at once a
biological and economic process. The brain thus finds itself in interminable conflict
because of a dopamine reward system which:
can usurp control of the motivational, attentional, and even cognitive and conscious aspects of
the whole person. In effect, this midbrain circuit commits mutiny against the normal personal
control apparatus (Ross et al., 2008, 16).
The psychologically flawed individual then is at the heart of these brain-based

explanations of the economic actor (or economic-based explanations of the brain). But
while the figure of the ‘emorational man’ (notably still a gendered figure) emerges as a
challenge to the neoclassical characterization of homo economicus there are important
methodological and conceptual distinctions in the way in which these fields model the
brain. It is these distinctions which have consequences for those seeking to apply the
insights of the neuros to problems in public policy.
2.2. Discontinuties: modelling the brain

Despite apparent agreement between neuroeconomic, behavioural economic and
picoeconomic approaches on the post-rational human subject, important differences
remain between the new neuros, too often brushed over in the imperative to seek new
applications and policy implications derived from these research insights. Indeed as
Ross et al. (2008, ix) argue, while picoeconomics may have emerged from the
disciplinary and conceptual space opened up by behavioural economics, some of the
‘revolutionary rhetoric’ (Ross et al., 2008, 46) made by behavioural economists may be
overstated. In particular, they regard both behavioural and picoeconomics as existing
entirely within the neoclassical microeconomic framework, finding the central dismissal
of rational economic man problematic: ‘‘claims by behavioural economists that
observed systematic ‘irrationality’ in human behaviour ‘refutes’ standard neoclassical
theory should be rejected’’ (Ross et al., 2008, ix). Instead, they seek to show how
economic models, including that of ‘true economic agents’ can be used effectively to

account for the deviation of real human behaviour from expected, generalizable and
abstracted patterns. Favouring a hybrid approach between picoeconomics and
neuroeconomics, Ross et al. (2008, 120) argue that methodologically, the former’s
focus on the molar scale can be complemented by a neuroeconomic concern for the
molecular. They simply explain different parts of the same phenomena and are
enhanced by disciplines such as neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, neurodynamics,
neuropsychology and cognitive science (Ross et al., 2008, 123). Again, there is a
special place reserved for the study of dopamine as a neurotransmitter within the brain’s
reward system—signifying, it is claimed, the ‘chemical of satisfaction’ within a model of
human behaviour already prejudged to be economically satisficing.
Whether the behavioural psychological approach of either behavioural economics or
picoeconomics can actually be convincingly brought together with a neuroscientific
approach which methodologically eschews observable behaviours in favour of
measurable neural processes remains a moot point—psychological explanation being
somewhat at odds with neurological methods and foundations. Ross et al. make just
such a point with regards to the use of game theory (studies of strategic decision-making
and probability-calculating by optimizing economic agents), which is often drawn on in
anecdotes serving to popularize both behavioural and neuroeconomics. They affirm
that game theory itself cannot be challenged by any observable economic behaviour
because it is a mathematical approach which makes no empirical predictions (Ross
et al., 2008, ix). So the relationship of observable behaviour with formal modelling is
highly questionable, a nuance not fully appreciated by those who use game theoretic
scenarios and anecdotes in their recommendations for behaviourally inspired public
policymaking and applications. In outlining ‘the politics of models’, Schüll and Zaloom
(2011, 528) provide a most comprehensive account of the distinctions between
neuroeconomics and behavioural economics, based on interviews with many prominent
proponents of the new neuros. They identify the heart of the matter as a schism between
‘one- and two-brain models’ of human cognition. So for neuroeconomists and
neuroscientists trained in biological methods, the decision-making subject has one
holistic brain, albeit one which may be characterized by internal conflict. This conflict is
not reducible to a dualistic model or any notion of discrete functional brain regions; the
brain must always work as a whole system and our theories of the brain must always be
justified by real, physical and observable phenomena (Schüll and Zaloom, 2011, 523).
In contrast, behavioural economists and those researchers with training in economics
favour a two-brain model based on internal competition. This model opposes the
rational, reasoning, abstract and long-term to the irrational, limbic, emotional, affective
and impulsive parts of the brain. This is often used to account for what behavioural
8 of 25 . Pykett
economists term ‘hyperbolic discounting’ or myopic decision-making which appears to

go against traditional models of rationality, pointing towards the systematic irration-
ality of our heuristic biases and apparent inconsistencies (Schüll and Zaloom, 2011,
522). Note again that some regard the use of heuristics as entirely rational and
psychologically adaptive (e.g. Girgerenzer and Brighton, 2009), along the lines of a
more biological account of human nature. The key point here is that while there seems
to be an apparent consensus within the new neuros on the necessary demise of Homo
Economicus, their methodological differences attest to some crucial distinctions in
modelling the human brain. Thus, the relative status of biological or economic
explanation is clearly distinguished. In the neuroeconomic account the holistic brain is

viewed as a biophysical and observable reality, while the behavioural economic/
picoeconomic account posits a theoretical competition between economic choices made
by the rational versus the irrational mind. As the next section observes, this distinction
is underplayed in the rush to popularize and utilize behavioural insights in public
policy. Drawing attention back to these discontinuities therefore has the potential to
provide fresh grounds on which to investigate the politics of contemporary attempts to
govern that very irrationality.
2.3. The politics of irrationality

This notion of systematic irrationality features prominently in Thaler and Sunstein’s
(2008, 19) narrative of a battle between the ‘automatic’ and ‘reflective’ minds. They
suggest policy interventions which address the need to cultivate the reflective mind and
demand decision-making environments which take advantage of the automatic mind to
favour more ‘desirable’ choices. This approach has been taken up in recommendations
for a more emotionally literate public policy from the UK’s Cabinet Office/Institute for
Government (Dolan et al., 2010). Here, Dan Ariely’s work on the human propensity to
be ‘predictably irrational’ is cited as a context for government to replace the traditional
tools of taxation, information and hard regulation with smarter policy levers which
fully recognize that ‘our behaviour is guided not by the perfect logic of a
super-computer that can analyse the cost-benefits of every action’ (Dolan et al., 2010,
13). Such insights have now been embedded in the Coalition Government’s health
policy (Cabinet Office, 2010, 30), which states that government action should involve:
changing social norms and default options so that healthier choices are easier for people to
make. There is significant scope to use approaches that harness the latest techniques of
behavioural science to do this—nudging people in the right direction rather than banning or
significantly restricting their choices.
More recently, interventions from prominent neuroscientists on the role of emotions

within processes of reasoning and from the field of ‘emotion science’ (applying a
neuroscientific or cognitive scientific approach to variables of affect and emotion; Fox,
2008) have been used to further confirm the conceptual errors in accounts of rational
economic man. The work of Damasio (1994) has been of particular note in its influence.
Proclaiming ‘Descartes’ Error’ in his dualism between body and mind, Damasio’s
(1994, 173) theory of ‘somatic markers’ holds that rationality is always driven by
embodied experience and its emotional correlates within the brain. This gives further
kudos to the claims that effective policy making, education and marketing need to
harness the emotional aspects of decision-making. One recent example can be found in
the growing agenda for early intervention programmes relating to parenting skills and
child development, which draws (sometimes rather vaguely, it must be said) on ‘new’
insights from the (neuro)science of emotions. For instance, Early Intervention, The Next
Steps (Cabinet Office, 2011b, 14)3 argues for a focus on how ‘[e]arly experiences
determine brain architecture’, where the effects of social disadvantage can be observed
in the brains of children as young as 22 months (Cabinet Office, 2011b, xiii). It is thus
put that:
[s]cience illustrates that well-meant attempts to understand and tackle social problems have
often failed because they have taken little account of the fact that children’s early experiences

lay the foundation for their future development. (Cabinet Office, 2011b, 14)
While clearly not limited to using neuroscientific insights for economic

decision-making, the notion of early intervention builds on challenges to Homo
Economicus by outlining a cost-efficient programme for the encouragement of empathy
and the modulation of emotional response in order to reduce social disadvantage. This
will, by implication, ‘hard wire’ a more rational set of behaviours in the long term. The
brain-based explanations here appear to produce a politically narrow view of the
potential influence of the economic—and thereby geographical—contexts in which
people’s brains develop differently. At its most basic then, neurocapitalism can be seen
to explain away disadvantage at the neural level, with scant regard for the
political-economic determinants of inequality.
Early intervention programmes are by no means the only policy instruments now
drawing on these models of the human brain, but as Schüll and Zaloom (2011) note,
policy makers can be rather selective when it comes to which conception of human
(ir)rationality they chose; the ‘one-brained’ model from neuroeconomics or the
‘two-brained’ posed by behavioural economics. Schüll and Zaloom (2011, 528) also
point out that neuroeconomists may promote morally neutral policy imperatives, given
that short-term, self-harming behaviours are determined within neural systems and not
by rational choice. These may include education, training in self-management, attempts
to change a person’s conscious values. By contrast, the account offered by behavioural
economists (including both Camerer ‘asymmetric paternalism’ and Thaler and Suntein’s
‘libertarian paternalism’) is arguably more influential in policy precisely because of its
contrasting conception of the human subject:
although dual-systems [two-brain/behavioural economic] advocates recast this subject as

neurological rather than moral, and as an incipient, rather than a consistent, rational actor,
they preserve intact its essential capacity for rationality—and thus for governability within a
liberal framework (Schüll and Zaloom, 2011, 532).
The libertarian paternalist approach favours designing ‘choice architectures’ which

nudge people’s more rational and reasonable brains towards decisions which are not
self-defeating, but welfare enhancing—without apparently compromising subjective
freedoms. It is by brushing over the neurobiological complexity of (ir)rationality, that
behavioural economists can offer policy solutions which appeal to policy makers who
3 Thank you to Ellie Jupp for pointing out this publication.

10 of 25 . Pykett
have little time to contemplate many of the uncertainties and inconsistencies offered up
within the new neuros. At the very least, favouring this dualistic and economistic model
of the brain and behaviour raises questions about the politics of governing practices
based on selective conceptions of consciousness and the social. These very specific
constructions of the economic agent and human nature to be found among the new
neuros remain to be fully challenged. Is it really the case, as argued by the French
government’s Centre d’analyse stratégique, that Homo Economicus has been superseded
by a more emotionally sensitive, psychologically complex and neurobiologically
knowable ‘homo consumerus’ (Oullier and Sauneron, 2010, 13)? Or is it more that
the human brain itself is not well suited to capitalist economies? In essence, it is by

discerning the precise models of the human subject selected by policy makers, and
unpacking their basis in biological and economic thinking that we can generate an
alternative analysis of a more geographically situated subject. Economic geography is
well placed to take this analysis forward. However, as the next section argues, those
economic geographers already explicitly interested in behavioural economics could go
further in attending to the political implications of a world in which the economic actor
is reconfigured as irrational subject.
3. Why is (some) economic geography not (more of) a political

science?4
The new neuros within economic theory signify the culmination of a long running
relationship between the biological sciences and economic thinking. The Darwinian
inclinations of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek’s interest in psychology and cultural
evolution theory are well known (see Ulshöfer, 2008, 213). Hayek in particular has been
identified as an early forerunner of the neuroeconomic approach, for his work on the
sensory theory of value, his theories of perception, sensorimotor and bodily processes,
innovation, imitation and tacit knowledge (Hayek, 1952, cited in Basso et al., 2010,
230). Meanwhile, within economic geography, calls to become an ‘evolutionary science’
(Boschma and Frenken, 2006) have sought to revive these biological and behavioural
links and it is this evolutionary economic perspective which seems to have missed an
opportunity to fully consider the political-economic implications of neurocapitalism.
Concerned primarily with the locational decisions of firms in light of the behavioural
notion of bounded rationality, evolutionary economic geography as outlined by
Boschma and Frenken (2006, 278–9) is itself suffused with the Darwinian language of
‘selection forces’, ‘survival’, ‘fitter’ routine practices, the collective ‘intelligence’ of a
population/industry and ‘feedback’ mechanisms. As a contrasting approach to the
neoclassical conception of individual, rational and utility-maximizing agents working
towards dynamic equilibrium, an evolutionary economic geography revisits earlier
work in behavioural geography (e.g. Pred, cited in Boschma and Frenken, 2006, 292).
This work draws attention to the contextual nature of decision-making (in both time
and space) and the role of routine practices and institutions in shaping real-world—as
opposed to theoretical—decisions (see also Wolpert, 1964; Dicken, 1971). As I will go
4 This subtitle is a response to the question posed by Boschma and Frenken (2006): ‘Why is economic
geography not an evolutionary science?’ The (admittedly rather clunky) qualifiers have been added to
make clear that it is not my intention to suggest that all economic geography is inadequately political.
on to claim, what is missing from this particular strand of economic geography is a

sustained political critique of the evolutionary aspects of behaviour and the biological
correlates of bounded decision-making. These are important but problematic develop-
ments in economics. By contrast, the argument presented in this article is for a more
critical exposition of the cultural- and political-economic foundations of neural,
psychological and behavioural explanation, without a return to the reductionist
missteps of sociobiology5. Given the contemporary value ascribed to the new neuros as
a novel orthodoxy in public policy making and popular psychological thought, it is
crucial to draw closer attention to their contested nature.
The significance of the new neuros within economic theory has by no means gone

unnoticed by politically engaged economic geographers from feminist and political
economy traditions in particular. In her analysis of the role of ‘testosterone capitalism’
in the global financial crisis of the late 2000s, McDowell (2010, 655) notes a
neuroeconomics research paper by Coates and Herbert which sought to explain the
hormonal- and brain-based drivers of volatile market behaviour. This study on the
relationship between profitability and the testosterone levels of market traders in the
City of London found a correlation between high levels of testosterone, risk taking,
overconfidence and profit loss. While McDowell is cautious of the neuroeconomic
tendency towards biological determinism, she finds the arguments convincing in
supporting the explanation of economic crises and workplace performances which her
work has developed. Already we see the potential for economic geography to extend an
economic concern for embodied and ‘brained’ behaviours beyond the narrow confines
of individual (or firm) decision-making towards a more significant appreciation of
whole global financial cultures. Work by Clark (2010, 2011) and Strauss (2008, 2009)
has gone further in its engagement with behavioural economic approaches. Like
evolutionary approaches, such authors appeal to an older behavioural geography in
order to understand the bounded rationality of the economic actor (e.g. Barnes and
Sheppard, 1992). But by contrast they are more forthcoming in specifying the
limitations of behavioural economics and cognitive science from a geographical point of
view. While Strauss (2008, 138) stands out in her warning that economic geographers
‘ignore the rise of behaviouralism in economics at their peril’, at the same time she
questions the way in which behavioural economics leaves intact the culturally specific
and biologically essentialist ideology of the autonomously acting individual. In addition
she draws attention to the role of cultural and geographical context in decision-making,
arguing for a far more sustained critique of the assumptions of behaviouralism (Strauss,
2008, 8). Sharing this project to revive a behavioural economic geography which has
taken account of the paradigm-shifting contribution of the new neuros, Clark (2010,
166), too, articulates an agenda for economic geography which does not simply co-opt
behavioural methods and insights, but develops a specifically geographical incarnation
of ‘the behavioural revolution’. By this, he means to address the deficiencies,
assumptions and methods of behavioural economics by again elaborating on the
contextual determinants of decision-making, as well as better understanding the
interaction between context and behavioural traits (Clark, 2010, 9). Like McDowell, this
work is applied to an analysis of the global financial crisis, specifically here the part
played by myopic or short-term thinking in sustaining market volatility (Clark, 2011).
5 Thanks to Ian Cook for this point.

12 of 25 . Pykett
Being perhaps the only geographer to make reference to behavioural economists,

picoeconomists (George Ainslie, in Clark, 2010, 168) and neuroeconomists (Clark,
2010, 170, note 2), it is worth dwelling on his research in some detail.
Clark does draw heavily on the new neuro ‘insights’ towards which this article has
remained sceptical (e.g. Ainslie, Girgerenzer, Loewenstein and Prelec, Shiller, Tversky
and Kahneman). To a certain extent, he attributes the global financial crisis to
fundamental behavioural flaws among both bankers and regulators. These include the
following: myopia, discounting the future, overconfidence, hubris, salience and the
conjunction fallacy (where decisions are skewed by mistaking additional sources of
information for something which is more likely) (Clark, 2011, 8). He argues that:
‘‘myopia ruled the day in financial markets turning a ‘virtuous circle’ of risk-sharing

into a ‘vicious downward spiral’ of contagious market failure’’ (Clark, 2011, 5). But his
story does not end there and he is at pains to address economic geographers’ concerns
about universal or biologically determinist accounts of human nature (Clark, 2011, 6).
It is therefore in identifying the behavioural geographies of the global financial crisis,
that he is able to point towards the wider political and regulatory implications of this
novel understanding of market instability. These geographies relate specifically to a
global financial context which has exacerbated myopic predispositions, since: ‘financial
markets are very demanding environments where customary or everyday modes of
decision-making are typically not effective under conditions of risk and uncertainty
(often confounding the expectations of decision-makers)’ (Clark, 2011, 11). The three
principal geographical factors highlighted by Clark are as follows: the bounded nature
of markets (that being spatially proximate to global financial centres conveys
advantages in market intelligence); the role of (presumably spatially specific) commu-
nity norms in market valuation and risk assessment (Clark, 2011, 12); the (spatial and
temporal) distance of investing agents (traders) from the companies on behalf of whom
they invest. To this, one can similarly add the contextual role of the financial media in
producing ‘imitative contagion’ (French et al., 2009, 298), whereby the ‘power of images
to affect the public mood’ and the ‘self-confirming fear’ and ‘inherent excitability’ of
financial journalism are held as themselves constitutive of the crisis. Clark notes that
behavioural economists may have failed to pay sufficient attention to these contextual
and interactional factors not just because of their adherence to individualist models of
cognition, but also because of their methodological shortcomings. In relying on
experimental methods largely carried out in their own lecture theatres with college
students, they cannot hope to understand the specific behavioural demands of a
complex environment such as the global financial markets (Clark, 2011, 14).
Hence for economic geographers like Strauss and Clark, behaviours are never wholly
individual, neural or psychological, but are always in dynamic interaction with context.
Strauss (2008) arguably goes further than Clark in this regard, in her deep consideration
of the structural and gendered power dynamics of personal financial behaviours.
According to Clark (2010, 167), this may be seen in the socio-demographic correlates of
risk taking behaviour (e.g. gender, class, income, marital status), the unequally
distributed capacity for deliberation and planning, the region of residence or cultures of
shared assumptions (Clark 2010, 169). Notwithstanding this attention to the cultural
and social determinants of behaviour, however, there may remain potential limits to
this approach. The conclusion that the global financial crisis can be explained by the
interaction of myopic predispositions and contextual factors still leaves intact the sense
that the instability of global capitalism is a temporary, systems-based and thus soluble
problem rather than one of inherent inequalities and injustices in economic, political
and regulatory power. The appeal to behavioural economic explanations within
geography has already sparked some debate in this vein. For Lewis (2011, 36), the
explanation of context here is too institutional and not sufficiently cultural—‘little is
said about intermediaries or actors other than banks’. One could add that the appeal to
universal human behaviours does not take account of the cultural specificity of
norm-formation and indeed constructions of the human. In this way, the behavioural–
contextual approach offered by Clark may be too optimistic about the possibility of
correction, and by implication does not go far enough towards an understanding of how
global financial capitalism is itself produced, performed and sustained. While there is
arguably no shortage of political economic geography (see Sheppard, 2011) and cultural

economic perspectives (see James et al., 2007) within geography, there remains room to
develop a more fruitful dialogue between economic geography and cultural, political
and philosophical debates from the wider discipline. This could contribute to a less
accommodating and more wide-ranging critical analysis of the implications of the
neuroscientific economic orthodoxies for understanding governing practices, economic
cultures and the cultural–political imagination itself.
In asking the provocative question of why economic geography is not a political
science it is important to bear in mind the extensive work in this sub-discipline which is
already politically, culturally and philosophically accomplished. Not least, Peck’s
(2010) sustained examinations of the ideational trajectory of neoliberalism, as well as
several authors concerned with the socially and culturally embedded economy.
However, the question of whether and how an economic hegemony might be culturally
internalized in the human subject remains unresolved. There are also those who remain
outwardly dismissive of the potential of cultural approaches in economic geography for
resolving (or at least refining) this question (Scott, 2004, 495). Notwithstanding this
hostility, economic geographers have already begun to critically interrogate the rise of
neuroeconomics, behavioural economics and picoeconomics within the discipline of
economics. However, both within evolutionary economic geography perspectives, or
alternatively within a renewed behavioural economic geography, there remains a risk
that a fairly narrow approach to economic decision-making, behaviour and geographies
of the firm may be given centre-stage, or that neuroscientific and behavioural insights
are too readily adopted. At worst, the convergence of biological-economic approaches
will go unquestioned. A more concerted engagement between cultural, political and
economic geography has the potential to better critique the emergence of the new
neuros in wider cultures of public policy and the commercial sector.
Geographers have begun to make tentative forays into the complex social worlds of
the new neuros. The role of these novel economic orthodoxies in the geographies of
public policies aimed at ‘behaviour change’ has been discussed at length by Barnett
(2010), Jones et al. (2011b), Whitehead et al. (2011), Pykett et al. (2011) and their
function in constituting dislocated and curiously disembodied feminized subject
positions has also been considered (Pykett, 2012). Elsewhere, Davies (2010) has
drawn attention to the reductionist tendencies of neuroscience’s experimental research
methods and has questioned the applicability of ‘mouse models’ to explanations of
human behaviour, in particular as justifications for pharmaceutical interventions.
Meanwhile, McCormack (2007, 360) provides an interesting account of how
neurochemistry came to dominance as a way of mapping the ‘material economies of
the human body’ in the 1950s and 1960s after a much longer period when the brain
14 of 25 . Pykett
could only be understood through the analogy of neurotransmission and electrical

impulse. He examines how these material economies—specifically a concern for the
scale of the neuromolecular—have come to be ‘potentially manipulated and managed’
(McCormack, 2007, 360), particularly through pharmaceutical means. He also shows
how everyday activities such as eating have been re-imagined as a means to alter our
neurochemistry, through ‘nutraceuticals’ (McCormack, 2007, 363). His work is part of
a vocal set of debates around the politics of affect in human geography, which has
implications for the kinds of questions that economic geographers might ask about the
new neuros. To provide a brief summary of these critical dialogues, the use of
neuroscientific insights by human geographers promoting a turn to affect and/or
non-representational approaches has recently been called into question by Papoulias

and Callard (2010). The central insight used by affect theorists is that the brain and/or
body acts before we can conceptualize, cognize, think or know what we are doing.
Geographers such as Thrift (2004) and McCormack (2007) have sought a rapproche-
ment between the social sciences and biological sciences through attention to the
non-cognitive determinants of action. But Papoulias and Callard contend that this turn
to affect has relied too heavily on the selective take up of certain lessons from certain
neuroscientists. They take issue with both Thrift and McCormack’s claim that a
neuroscientific account is central to the very possibility of thinking and thus identify a
key problem relating to the political purchase offered by these cultural geographical
derivations of neuroscience: ‘[n]euroscience emerges, in other words, as a kind of
mainspring of cultural theory, capable of accounting for its method, if not its very
existence’ (Papoulias and Callard (2010, 138). The political and philosophical
implications of this move are also examined by both Barnett (2008, 188) and Pile
(2010, 9), with reference to the disputable ‘layer cake’ model of embodied consciousness
forwarded within human geographies of affect. For Pile, by separating the
non-cognitive (affective), pre-cognitive (feelings) and the cognitive (expressed emo-
tions), geographers of affect tend towards ‘mechanistic’ and indeed ‘mystical’ accounts
of the human psyche (Pile, 2010, 10; see also Thien, 2005). This leads to a fundamental
distrust of people’s capacity to represent their own conscious thoughts. It can therefore
be argued that cultural geographers of affect are inadvertently led into the realm of
biological determinism already flirted with and ultimately dismissed by behavioural
geographers of yore (e.g. Walmsley and Lewis, 1993). In particular, Barnett (2008, 196)
draws attention to the inconsistency of arguing that affects can be both automatic
(determined by pre-cognitive neural processes) and open to manipulation by potentially
malign (or even benign) forces.
It is not my intention to provide a comprehensive review of this work. The issues and
arguments are far more nuanced than I have presented here. Rather, I want to use this
research to develop some distinctive political and philosophical concerns which might
usefully be developed in dialogue with economic geography for generating critical
approaches to the ‘behavioural revolution’ sweeping mainstream economic thought,
echoing Strauss’ call for a more critically engaged behavioural economic geography.
The first concern is a call for a political geography of what could be termed
‘neurocapitalism’, arguing that the new neuros or economic orthodoxies identified
above amount to much more than disciplinary developments. They are generative of a
novel kind of ‘brain-world’ (Malabou, 2008, 39) which requires further analysis in of
itself. The second further develops a critique of the behaviouralism found in the new
neuros, arguing that economic agents have been too easily conceptualized as
decision-making actors as opposed to cultural subjects. The final concern is with the
potential reductionism and biological determinism of the new neuros’ conceptions of
human consciousness. While human geographers are arguably well placed to question
these ‘reductionist returns’ (Davies, 2010), there are also signs that those geographers
philosophically favouring materialist, non-representational or speculative realist
positions resurrect these same old problems, with deleterious consequences for the
political currency of the discipline as a whole.
4. Three concerns: neurocapitalism, behaviouralism, biological

determinism

4.1. Neurocapitalism: constructing the brain-world
In an article picked up by the New York Times in February 20106, German authors
Hess and Jokeit (2009) use the term ‘neurocapitalism’ to refer to the way in which the
19th century capitalist concept of psychoanalytic neuroses has been replaced by a
contemporary concept of libertarian self-improvement—whether through treating
depressive illness, the development of neuro-enhancers or the increasing control of our
states of attention. The contention here is that the burgeoning of neuroscientific
research papers, journals, conferences and institutes signifies much more than mere
disciplinary, technological or methodological evolution. And as previously noted, the
enthusiasm with which neuroscientific insights have been taken up by governments,
educators, marketers and economists attests to the potential impact of such develop-
ments in everyday life. It has been suggested for instance that neuroscientists are
explicitly influenced by commercial interests, with at least 88 neuroscience institutes and
for-profit organizations emerging in USA by 2004 (as a result of the expense of
neuroimaging technologies and equipment) (Ulshöfer, 2008, 191).
An exciting area of academic interest has therefore come out of a sense of disquiet
with the cultural, political, social and economic implications for this new relationship
we have with our brains, changing how we interact with and act on the world
(Hauptmann, 2010, 13). Critical neuroscience (Choudhury et al., 2009), or Noopolitics,
as it is sometimes known (after Lazzarato, cited in Hauptmann, 2010, 12) builds upon
philosophical concerns for understanding subjectivity, mind–body consciousness, and
social and object relations in order to critically analyze the role of neuroscience in
society—seeing ‘neuroscience itself as a cultural activity’ (Choudhury et al., 2009, 63).
Many authors develop a broadly Foucauldian perspective which examines the social
and cultural contexts in which neuroscientific ‘discoveries’ are constructed. This involves
both close attention to laboratory methods and genealogical accounts which outline the
historical contingency of the neuroscientific ‘moment’ (e.g. Abi-Rached and Rose,
2010). In so doing, such authors are able to identify cultural, social, political and not
least economic explanations for various neuroscientific findings and trends (Maasen
and Sutter, 2007). To give an example, Abi-Rached and Rose (2010, 11) argue that it
was not until the 1960s and 1970s that neuroscience became a truly distinctive
discipline, based around a new focus on the neuromolecular scale of explanation. In
concert with philanthropic donations to research institutes and the growing power of
6 ‘The Dawn of neurocapitalism’, at http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/the-dawn-of-neurocapit

alism/ (Accessed 17 February 2010).
16 of 25 . Pykett
the pharmaceutical industry, this ‘neuromolecular gaze’ continued a longer rationale for
the psychological sciences towards the ‘management of all manner of human activities
and experiences, from psychiatric illness to economic behaviour, from human sociality
to spirituality and ethics.’ (Abi-Rached and Rose, 2010, 32).
Others, too, see neuroscientific developments as intimately wrapped up with the late
capitalist mode of production. In a study of the neuroscience of the ‘brain at rest’,
Callard et al. (2010, 23), for instance, argue that even ‘the resting brain has been
territorialized: it is conceptualized and materialized as a matrix that is constituted as
perpetually productive. . .’ As part of a post-Fordist knowledge economy, neuroscience
is thus mobilized to show the creative and productive capital of apparently aimless
forms of inattention such as daydreaming. It is not too much of a leap, therefore, to see

how the brain sciences are implicated in flexible capitalism; the kind of capitalism which
requires emotionally intelligent, self-managing, risk-handling, relationship-managing,
adaptive and entrepreneurial economic actors (Ulshöfer, 2008, 196; see also Boltanski
and Chiapello, 2005).
It is not simply that the new neuros have been shown to be driven by the commercial
interests of the pharmaceutical industry, state imperatives for self-governing popula-
tions or the late capitalist requirement of a flexible, adaptable, creative and emotionally
intelligent workforce. There is also a circularity issue here. In popular science, media
representations and in the application of the new neuros, ideal citizen-subjects are
re-imagined through a market economic model of individual decision-making. This
influences how we conceive of human nature, ‘normal’ behaviour and personal
responsibility. For example, the arguably very social notion of trust gets framed as a
mere expression of oxytocin levels (the hormone said to indicate trust)—with ovulating
women being categorized as inherently untrustworthy due to raised levels of
progesterone said to inhibit oxytocin uptake (Durante and Saad, 2010). This allows
neuroeconomists such as Zak and Nadler (2010, 70) to develop a ‘managers’ toolkit’
which can help firms to develop trusting work environments through their ‘O-Factor
Survey’. Here political-economic issues around worker relationships are reframed as
biophysical questions relating to hormone levels. Similarly, the political-economic
question of paying taxes is seen to be publically acceptable (though not as much as
giving charitable donations) not because it is ethical, economic or redistributive, but
because it is a physiological response to the reward centre of the brain (Tierney, cited in
Ulshöfer, 2008, 211). This sense of circularity resonates with work on the concept of
plasticity coming from a different philosophical tradition. Drawing on Bergson, as
Hauptmann (2010, 14) notes, the projection of our mental states onto spatial forms in
turn shapes our experiences of the world and our consciousness. So it is not enough to
state that our behaviour is shaped by our brains’ perceptions, environmental contexts or
even the interconnections of both. Dominant conceptualizations and ideas of the new
neuros themselves influence our perceptions and actions. Clark’s (2011) analysis of the
regulatory underestimation of myopic behaviour in the global financial crisis goes some
way to appreciating this, but does not go so far as to evaluate the role of the new neuros
in re-producing global capitalist culture itself. By contrast, a distinctive politics of
neural plasticity has been identified within philosophy, albeit one suppressed by
dominant accounts of the brain as a deterministic organ and attempts to identify a
universal and stable human nature. For Malabou (2008, 4), ‘The brain is plastic, and we
do not know it’. The dominant narrative of the cognitive sciences as a whole, she claims,
is to explain what our brains make us do, rather than to answer the question of what we
should do with our brain. More specifically put, she asks ‘[w]hat should we do with the
consciousness of the brain that does not simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism?’
(Malabou, 2008, 12). Through this question, attention is drawn to the mistaken
conflation of plasticity and flexibility. A management discourse of flexibility in the
labour market, through adaptability, employability, suppleness and ability to change or
‘receiving form’ is well known within contemporary capitalism, but this ignores the
sense in which plasticity also connotes giving form (Malabou, 2008, 12, my emphasis).
Thus she asserts, ‘flexibility is plasticity minus its genius’; it is plasticity which allows us
to act, to learn, to refuse, to make history. The worry is therefore that the new neuros,
with their focus on the fundamental flaws, irrationality and inconsistency of

decision-making serve to erase the sense of political empowerment which comes with
a more culturally sensitive account of plasticity.
4.2. Behaviouralism: constructing the subject

The second problem posed by too readily accommodating the new neuros is an
insensitivity to the residual behaviouralism of these disciplinary knowledges. The
shortcomings of behaviouralism have been well rehearsed within geography (e.g.
Golledge and Stimson, 1987; Walmsley and Lewis, 1993; Pile, 1996). Despite having
mounted a significant challenge to Homo Economicus, introduced new models of the
perceptual environment and foregrounded individual experience, behavioural geog-
raphy was vigorously criticized as overly descriptive, voluntaristic, naı̈vely empiricist
and insufficiently aware of the cultural, social, political and economic contexts which
shape decision-making. In presenting mechanical and atomistic accounts of human
cognition (in behavioural geography and repeated by the new neuros), the constitutive
role of the brain-world itself, interpretative schema and self-knowledge produced by the
neurosciences is fundamentally ignored. As Ley (1981, 213) pointed out, behavioural
geographers were guilty of ‘[t]he absorption of man [sic] into naturalist explanation
[which] invariably implies reduction of what it is to be human’. To this dehumanizing
tendency, could be added a propensity to aggregate observable behaviours into social
phenomena and perhaps most crucially, a gap in thinking through the processes of
subject-formation. And as Pile (1996, 46) has argued, behavioural geography took the
‘man’ of ‘man-environment’ relations as given, failing to acknowledge the way in which
the individual or subject is her/himself is produced through discourse, is performed
through situated practices and is constituted through social relations. All of which may
well be ‘unobservable’ in both behavioural geography and neuroeconomic/behavioural
economic categories of neural functioning, emotional processes, decision-making and
behaviour. Here we see the potential contribution of more cultural theoretical traditions
to resolving the question of how the new neuros are implicated in re-constructing the
post-rational subject within both the popular imagination and the applications which
shape our everyday experiences. This work also goes some way to outlining how despite
an emphasis on systematic irrationality, we still act as if we are knowing, reflexive and
rational subjects.
The notion of the economic ‘actor’ at the heart of some strands of geography may
also be guilty of this neglect of cultural subjectification. In reviving behavioural
accounts such as Pred’s ‘behavioural matrix’, particularly in evolutionary economic
geography (Boschma and Lambooy, 1999, 414), the economic decision-making engaged
in by actors becomes reduced to locational decisions based on ‘firm-specific
18 of 25 . Pykett
competences’, ‘access to information’ and highly localized conceptions of common

cultures or human capital. The biological sense of agency mobilized here is explicit:
‘firms and other organizations are active actors in a Lamarckian sense who not only
adapt their behaviour to the external environment but also adapt their environment in
accordance with their own needs’ (Boschma and Lambooy, 1999, 424). Similarly, while
the new neuros too reject the rational economic actor, the economic actor remains the
key object of enquiry. It has been argued that this objectification of the human subject
may be a result of the methodological limitations of experimental neuroscientific
research. While people tested in neuroscience laboratories may be described as research
subjects, their histories and biographies are not usually deemed to be important, their

subjective experiences of having various tests exacted upon them can go unnoticed and
the cultural stereotypes to which reporting scientists sometimes resort may all be
downplayed in the search for objectified and generalizable findings (Ulshöfer, 2008,
202). Thus, Karafyllis and Ulshöfer (2008, ix) are able to show how the new neuros
themselves produce social and cultural norms in their accounts of human action,
particularly in terms of the gendered aspects of cultural subjectification, observing ‘a
fundamental (hetero)sexualization of the brain’. Challenges to both the abstraction of
rational economic man and to behaviouralism are not unprecedented outside of a
neurological/behavioural/picoeconomic framework. Such challenges have been
mounted from within economic theory, through feminist economics (at once sceptical
of the masculinized Homo Economicus and biological determinism) and the
French-based movement of ‘post-autistic economics’ (Ferber and Nelson, 1993;
Fullbrook, 2003). Neither field prioritizes the brain in their analyses, instead drawing
attention to the structural constraints on decision-making, relations of power within
economic systems and the wider cultural embeddedness of economic behaviour. The
power of their political critique is based on an attention to the constitutive role of
economics itself in reproducing an autistic (read metaphorically rather than medically
as an undifferentiated economics obsessed with mathematical modelling, socially
irresponsible, and without a theory of the mind) and ‘culturally sexist’ epistemology
(Nelson, 2001). Therefore there are ample theoretical resources available from within
economics and economic geography from which to further interrogate the political
implications of the new neuros. It may therefore be worthwhile for geographers to
engage more fully with these heterodox economic approaches (as has been noted by
Sheppard, 2006, 3; Lee et al., 2008, 1112) before too enthusiastically embracing
behavioural, biological or evolutionary perspectives.
4.3. Biological determinism: constructing ‘monkey models’ of human

consciousness
Finally, it is important to further interrogate the biologicalism of the new neuros, by
which I mean both a tendency towards biological determinism, and the broader
concurrence of biological thinking and economic thought (which as previously noted,
travels in both disciplinary directions). Just as Davies (2010) has cautioned against the
use of ‘mouse models’ in developing neuroscientific applications for mental health, so
too must we warn against the ‘monkey models’ of human cognition sometimes
forwarded by the new neuros. For example, one of the architects of neuroeconomics,
Glimcher’s (2004, 322) lab research on the choice behaviours of monkeys found that
‘the behaviours of individual parietal neurons are well described by economic tools’.
Not only can the world of monkeys be understood through an economic lens, but in
turn, the conception of economic behaviour is one which is ultimately produced by
neurobiology. In this sense, the social sciences would have little role to play in
understanding behaviour, economics or indeed human consciousness. There is by no
means universal agreement among proponents of the new neuros as to the status of the
social and of consciousness and there is much hyperbole about the value of
neurobiological thinking, particularly in the more populist literatures. For instance,
Zweig (2007, 1) asserts that ‘investing behaviour is a basic biological function’ and ‘with
the wonders of imaging technology, we can now observe the precise neural circuitry that
switches on and off in your brain when you invest’. Glimcher (2004, 342) is also assured

that any philosophical debate around free will and consciousness has now been solved:
Free will may simply be the name we give to the probabilistic behaviours that are mixed
strategy solutions. Our subjective experience of deciding may be what we experience when a
mixed strategy solution requires the activation of a lawful [biophysical] neuronal randomizer
With the problem of free will, voluntary agency and conscious decision-making solved,
there would be little room for any notion of responsibility, ethical deliberation or social
and political debate. Indeed, picoeconomists Ross et al. (2008, 10) consider themselves
to ascribe to both a ‘sensible behaviouralism’ and a ‘pragmatic reductionism’ (Ross
et al., 2008, 121). They are explicitly dismissive of what they term the defeatist notion
that seemingly irrational, addictive behaviours are a ‘complex social syndrome’ best
given over to (by implication ‘mere’) novelists and oral historians (Ross et al., 2008, 7).
Ainslie (1992, 1) is more accommodating, stating that self-defeating behaviour may be
symptomatic of modern industrial societies. But the general consensus is that ‘like all
other known biological processes, consciousness is subject to natural selection and
follows the physical laws of the universe’ (Glimcher, 2004, 344). It also interesting to
reflect on a proclamation by prominent neuroscientist Colin Blakemore (on Radio 4’s
Today programme) that the debate about human consciousness is actually over,
although granted it may be unfair to pick apart statements made on an early morning
radio show. He stated that we know that it is the brain that thinks, that critics of
neuroscience have no alternative account and most strangely, that: ‘we have a brain,
people without brains don’t have thoughts, the brain must do it’7. People without
brains? It is notable how easy it is to slip into biological determinism regarding our
everyday explanations of the brain. At its most basic, this computational and
mechanistic account of personhood surely requires unpacking before the new neuros
are looked to as fertile ground for informing cultural and economic geographical
thought alike.
As the previous section argued, there are resources from within geography which may
contribute to this unpacking of the cultural subjects of the new neuros, although there
are equally warnings about naı̈vely ‘reading off’ subject positionings from political
rationalities, economic projects (e.g. Barnett et al., 2008) or the culture of neuroscience.
But there are also indications that some human geography research, whether broadly
cultural, political or economic, has itself been seduced by the new neuros—and is
7 Radio interview available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9519000/9519556.stm

(Accessed 24 June 2011).
20 of 25 . Pykett
therefore in danger of becoming less useful in providing the cultural resources for
challenging new economic orthodoxies. This is noted by Korf (2008, 716) who identifies
an attack on the modernist subject not just from neurobiologists, but also within
materialist, post-humanist and non-representational human geographies—replacing in
all cases the ethical subject with a biologically determined, embodied brain. More
recently, the philosophy of ‘speculative realism’ or ‘speculative materialism’ has been
explored by human geographers and in human geography journals (Elden, 2008;
Saldanha, 2009; Harman, 2010; Meillassoux, 2012; Jackson and Fannin, 2011),
suggesting a growing flirtation with a philosophical agenda which itself is highly
derivative of the neurosciences. Seen as a materialist corrective to anti-reductionist

arguments, speculative realism draws in part on the controversial neurophilosophy of
Paul Churchland, who argues that neuroscience will eventually do away with
philosophical debates on consciousness, belief, perception and other such ‘folk
psychologies’. As a key proponent of this approach, Brassier (2001, 375) has noted
that: ‘[a]ccording to Churchland’s neurocomputational physicalism, it is the brain, not
the mind, which represents the world’—leading him to argue for a naturalism which
attests without qualification that ‘human experience can and will be understood
scientifically’ (Brassier and Ieven, 2009, 2). If this is indeed the case, then we may
accordingly ask the broad question of what is left for the social sciences, arts,
humanities and economic research to achieve. More specifically, the lesson here is that
much philosophical groundwork remains to be done within human geography to
provide a normative critique of the neurocapitalism arguably characteristic of
contemporary western economies. Moreover, there is a need to look beyond geography
to emerging research in critical neuroscience in order to begin to find common grounds
for political engagement of this nature.
5. Conclusions
The trend towards neuroscientific explanation appears unstoppable in its popularity
and reach, with the ‘neuro’ prefix finding more and more endings and applications. The
neural agenda becomes enmeshed with other forms of knowledge, as seen in the
development of neuroeconomics, behavioural economics and picoeconomics. I have
examined how in the adoption of so-called new insights from the neurosciences, the new
neuros signify two important continuities. Firstly, the ongoing dominance of economic
orthodoxies in developing public policy strategies in western economies. And secondly,
the enduring concordance between biological and economic epistemologies. Economic
geography has begun to pay attention to these economic sub-disciplinary fields, but in
some cases has over-estimated the extent to which they pose a genuine challenge to
mainstream economic theory. Related calls for an evolutionary economic geography
and for a revival of behavioural economic geography may, by contrast, under-estimate
the wider cultural and political implications of conceptualizing economic practices,
knowledges and actors in these neuroscientific terms. Moreover, attempts to identify
the biological correlates of economic decision-making within the confines of the brain—
whether it be for the purposes of understanding the ‘financial brain’, the ‘short-sighted
brain’, the ‘emorational brain’, the learning brain’, the ‘political brain’, the ‘responsible
brain’ or the ‘anti-social brain—point to a more concerted attempt to re-imagine the
human subject.
Within the wider discipline of geography, engagement with philosophies of the

subject and of subjectification are well developed, whether from humanistic, Marxist,
feminist, psychoanalytic or post-structural approaches. And economic geography has
been forthcoming in deriving novel perspectives from this cultural turn which make
headway in rethinking the economic actor as cultural subject and the economy as
performed. But more recent post-humanist, non-representational and speculative realist
geographies may also have been too eager in their adoption of materialist under-
standings of ‘flesh and blood’ human beings and of biological accounts of human brains
and behaviour. While substantial disagreement remains, the question of why we
continue to act as if we are knowing subjects—able to give form to the world, make
decisions and judgments and partake in acts of refusal remains an important enigma.

Our attempts to rationalize persist in the face of neurobiological explanations for
consciousness and non-representational accounts of pre-cognitive, semiconscious,
distributed subjectivity (not to mention narratives of structural or sociological
determination). The widely presaged undoing of the subject within human geography
may therefore be premature (Dewsbury, 2007; Thrift, 2008; Wylie, 2010), and there
remains extensive work to be done in order to develop an adequate account of the
political, philosophical and economic implications of the discernable advent of
neurocapitalism.
Not least, this requires that human geography attend to not only the more obvious
concerns of the neurocapitalism, behaviouralism and biological determinism of the new
neuros but also to the expertise ascribed to these disciplines, the methodological
assumptions they make, and the ontological and epistemological claims advanced. Most
crucially, perhaps, accepting that we do act as if we were knowing subjects, albeit
‘plastic’ ones, means that we should be all the more preoccupied with elucidating how
the new neuros change the way in which subjects are conceived, constituted, shaped and
managed. This is not to resort to accusations of manipulation, brain control, subliminal
intervention or straightforward accounts of subjectification—as if they are automat-
ically effective and accomplished. Rather it is to pay closer attention to the use to which
the new neuros are being put in the fields of public policymaking, education and
commercial marketing (among others) and to interrogate the justifications for so doing.
In this way, it is possible to think more politically about how these biological-economic
orthodoxies are mobilized in the targeting of early welfare interventions, the
segmentation of social groupings, the prescription of (ir)rationality in decision-making
and the legitimization of government regulation and deregulation in the new
brain-world.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Kendra Strauss for her insightful comments on a draft of this article, and to the
anonymous reviewers. Thank you as ever to Rhys Jones and Mark Whitehead for providing
me with the opportunity to research these themes and for many interesting conversations along
the way.
Funding
I gratefully acknowledge funding from the Leverhulme Trust for the project, ‘The Time-Spaces of
Soft Paternalism in the UK’ (Grant number F/00 424/L) which provided the original impetus for
this research.
22 of 25 . Pykett
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Journal of Economic Geography Advance Access published December 10, 2012

Journal of Economic Geography (2012) pp. 1–25 doi:10.1093/jeg/lbs039

Neurocapitalism and the new neuros:

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Key words: Neuroscience, biological determinism, behaviouralism, policymaking

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The article proceeds as follows: Section 2 provides an introductory overview of the

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2. The new neuros: a critical review

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Table 1. Examples of ‘the new neuros’: knowledges, applications and critiques/qualifications

Neuro knowledges Applications Critical approaches/qualifications

Neurochemistry Neuroeducation Neurosexism

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2.1. Continuities within neuro knowledges: emorational human

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The psychologically flawed individual then is at the heart of these brain-based

2.2. Discontinuties: modelling the brain

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economists term ‘hyperbolic discounting’ or myopic decision-making which appears to

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2.3. The politics of irrationality

More recently, interventions from prominent neuroscientists on the role of emotions

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While clearly not limited to using neuroscientific insights for economic

although dual-systems [two-brain/behavioural economic] advocates recast this subject as

The libertarian paternalist approach favours designing ‘choice architectures’ which

3 Thank you to Ellie Jupp for pointing out this publication.

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3. Why is (some) economic geography not (more of) a political

on to claim, what is missing from this particular strand of economic geography is a

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5 Thanks to Ian Cook for this point.

Being perhaps the only geographer to make reference to behavioural economists,

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could only be understood through the analogy of neurotransmission and electrical

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4. Three concerns: neurocapitalism, behaviouralism, biological

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6 ‘The Dawn of neurocapitalism’, at http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/the-dawn-of-neurocapit

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4.2. Behaviouralism: constructing the subject

competences’, ‘access to information’ and highly localized conceptions of common

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4.3. Biological determinism: constructing ‘monkey models’ of human

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7 Radio interview available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9519000/9519556.stm

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Within the wider discipline of geography, engagement with philosophies of the

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Dicken, P. (1971) Some aspects of the decision-making behaviour of business organizations.

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