Brian Rohrig - The Chemistry of Money

The Chemistry of Money

The Chemistry of Money

By

Brian Rohrig

USA

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Print ISBN: 978-1-78262-983-2

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-78801-711-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Brian Rohrig 2021

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Preface

A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.

W.C. Fields

When I was a kid I found $10. I still vividly remember everything about that day. I was riding my bike to a park when, lo and behold, there was a $10 bill innocently lying along the side of the road, neatly folded in half. I couldn't believe my luck! When I arrived home, I breathlessly announced to anyone within earshot my good fortune. Even though this find happened over 40 years ago, it is still so vividly etched into my memory banks that it might have occurred yesterday.

We remember momentous, life-changing eventsgetting married, the birth of a child, landing a coveted job. Experiences packed with emotion stick with us, often for a lifetime. Many combat veterans never fully recover from the severe trauma they encountered during wartime. But positive emotional experiences are just as likely to stick with us as negative onesif you score the winning goal in the championship game you will never forget it. I still remember winning a history award in school, although perhaps not as vividly as finding that $10 bill by the side of the road.

No matter how bohemian you might consider yourself to be, there is no denying the magnetic pull of money. At the Money Museum in Chicago the most popular display is a suitcase filled with one-million dollars. People gather around and stare with a kind of reverential awe at the stacks of $100 bills neatly arranged in the suitcase, 100 stacks in all. You can get your picture taken by it and receive the photo as a souvenir. In mine, I'm grinning like a Cheshire cat, thrilled to be so close to so much wealth.

In the prologue to his fine book The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession, Peter L. Bernstein has this to say about gold, which of course has served as money throughout much of the world's history and in many ways still does today:

This book tells the story of how people have become intoxicated, obsessed, haunted, humbled, and exalted over pieces of metal called gold. Gold has motivated entire societies, torn economies to shreds, determined the fate of kings and emperors, inspired the most beautiful works of art, provoked horrible acts by one people against another, and driven men to endure hardship in the hope of finding instant wealth and annihilating uncertainty. (Excerpt reproduced from ref. with permission from John Wiley and Sons, Copyright 2001.)

Considering the incalculable toll of human misery brought on by mankind's quest for gold and all of its various incarnations, the Bible's declaration that the love of money is the root of all evil should come as no great surprise. Albert Einstein echoed these sentiments, saying, Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts its owners irresistibly to abuse it.

Numerous thinkers have tried to shed some light on humankind's near-universal mania over money. Freud postulated that money and feces were irrevocably intertwined. He argued that the universal identification of money as dirty or filthy is no accident. In Character and Anal Erotism, Freud wrote:

We know that the gold which the devil gives his paramours turns into excrement after his departure Indeed, even according to ancient Babylonian doctrine, gold is the feces of Hell It is possible that the contrast between the most precious substance known to men and the most worthless, which they reject as waste matter (refuse), has led to this specific identification of gold with feces.
The original erotic interest in defecation is, as we know, destined to be extinguished in later years. In those years, the interest in money makes its appearance as a new interest which had been absent in childhood. This makes it easier for the earlier impulsion, which is in process of losing its aim, to be carried over to the newly emerging aim.

With the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology in the 1990s, for the first time it was possible to look inside the brain, so to speak, in an attempt to figure out what really makes us tick. We could find out what we really thought about money, and how it might alter our brain chemistry. During magnetic resonance imaging a strong magnetic field, aided by a radio frequency pulse, causes all the hydrogen atoms within the water molecules of the body to line up in the same direction. In fMRI, changes in blood flow to particular areas of the brain can be measured with pinpoint accuracy. Oxygenated blood responds differently to a magnetic field than deoxygenated blood, providing that subtle difference that the fMRI scan can detect. So, when you read about the latest study that relates how a certain area of the brain lights up when a test subject looks at pictures of puppies, it means that fresh blood is flowing into that specific area of the brain, presumably a different area than when that same subject looks at pictures of broccoli. There are six basic emotionssurprise, anger, disgust, fear, sadness and happiness. Different regions of the brain are activated whenever one of these emotions is experienced. So, in theory, an FMRI scan can tell us what emotion we are feeling when we respond to a certain stimulus.

A plethora of studies have shown that looking at money, handling money, thinking about money and expecting to receive some money all light up certain areas of the brain like a Christmas tree. One study showed that the pain processing centers of the brain were activated when subjects taxed with spending a limited amount of money were faced with unreasonably high prices.