Online Video Guide

If you think you know why you do things, you're probably wrong. Exploring how our unconscious determines our behavior, Alan goes into a magnetic resonance scanner in the Caltech lab of Steven Quartz to find out how his brain reacts to products both cool and un-cool. Quartz and his associate Anette Asp are trying to find out why humans are obsessed with the social status of objects, and so are scanning the brains of people as they look at a range of products. Both Alan and Anette have brains that react strongly to things they find un-cool, as if they are recoiling from them. Steve, on the other hand, shows shop-aholic tendencies, his brain responding to cool objects not only in the region where his sense of self resides, but also in those regions controlling movement, as if he is reaching out to grab them.