Intro
Paul Glimcher is a neuroscientist, economist, psychologist, innovator and entrepreneur. His myriad different fields and interests eventually pushed him to help develop a new field: neuroeconomics. His revolutionary interdisciplinary approach has allowed him to put forth multiple theories about how humans behave and make decisions. Glimcher has become a greatly influential figure in the field of behavioral science as a result of the research he has conducted. He has written a plethora of inspiring articles and books and is perhaps most well-known for his contribution to the textbook Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain, the first text to examine the science behind economics.1 The textbook is now in its second edition and has become a standard reference for the field of neuroeconomics.
Paul Glimcher believed decisions could not wholly be explained through economic or mathematical models and thus birthed his atypical approach of using neuroscience to better account for the ways humans make decisions.2
A close relationship between the theory of economics, the theory of psychology, and the theory of neuroscience could be forged - but it would have to be forged by a partial reduction… as we adjust the conceptual objects in each discipline to maximize interrelations between disciplinary levels of analysis, we achieve both a formal reduction of two theories and a broadening range of the predictive range of both theories.
- Paul Glimcher in Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis
