The Collector's Brain: Dopamine, Desire, and the Missing Piece
From rare stamps to digital identities, explore the neurochemical drives that make us want to own, complete, and sometimes obsessively accumulate.
ReadyIn 1918, a postal clerk in Washington D.C. sold a sheet of 100 stamps that would become the most famous error in American philatelic history. The 24-cent stamp, meant to celebrate the new airmail service, featured a Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” airplane. On this single sheet, the plane was printed upside down. One of these Inverted Jenny stamps sold in 2023 for over $2 million. It’s just a small square of paper with a printing mistake. So why is it worth more than a house?
The answer isn’t in the paper or the ink. It’s in us. It’s in the peculiar, powerful, and deeply human compulsion to collect.
To Gather Together
To understand the pull, we have to pull apart the word. Collect arrives in English in the early 15th century, a hand-me-down from Old French collecter. But its true blueprint lies in Latin: colligere, meaning “to gather together.” It’s a simple compound of com- (“together”) and legere (“to gather”). That root, legere, is a linguistic powerhouse, giving us words like select, elect, and intelligent—all acts of choosing and gathering.
But there’s a parallel track. Ecclesiastical Latin had its own version, collēcta, a gathering for prayer. This hints at something deeper than just amassing stuff. Collecting has always been about bringing things—or people, or thoughts—into a cohesive, meaningful whole. It’s an act of imposition, of creating order and significance where there was none before.
Chambers of Wonder
This impulse to impose order on the world found its grandest early expression in the Wunderkammer, or “cabinet of curiosities.” These rooms, flourishing in 16th-century Renaissance Europe, were the precursors to our modern museums. They were not just collections; they were microcosms of the entire world, as understood by their wealthy and powerful owners.
Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, beginning his reign in 1576, assembled one of the most magnificent examples in his Prague castle. His Kunstkammer was an encyclopedic display blending naturalia (strange shells, fossils) with artificialia (intricate carvings, automata) and scientifica (clocks, astrolabes). A narwhal tusk sat near a mechanical celestial sphere. It was a physical manifestation of knowledge, power, and global reach.
These collections were theaters of the self. To display your cabinet was to display your intellect, your wealth, and your command over the distant and the strange. It was a way of organizing the world with yourself at its very center.
The Wanting Brain
That feeling—the thrill of the hunt, the flush of acquisition—isn’t just a feeling. It’s a chemical cascade. The brain’s reward system, specifically the mesolimbic pathway, is the engine of our desire. When a collector spots a potential prize, the ventral tegmental area (VTA) sends a surge of dopamine to the nucleus accumbens.
Here’s the critical twist, the one that explains so much about obsession: dopamine isn’t the “pleasure chemical.” It’s the “wanting chemical.” It governs motivation and anticipation far more than it governs the sensation of liking something. The neurological reward is often greater in the pursuit of the Inverted Jenny stamp than in the final act of possessing it.
This is also why the value of an object inflates the moment it becomes ours, a phenomenon known as the endowment effect. But this effect gets a powerful booster shot from another source: our own labor.
The Assembly Line of Affection
Why does that slightly wobbly bookshelf you assembled yourself feel more precious than a perfectly crafted, store-bought one? This is the IKEA Effect, a term coined in a 2011 study by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely. They found that participants who built their own simple IKEA boxes were willing to pay 63% more for them than participants who were merely presented with the pre-assembled boxes.
This isn't just about sunk costs. It's about a deep psychological need for competence and the justification of our own effort. When we successfully complete a task, our brain rewards us with a feeling of “effectance.” That positive self-regard spills over onto the object of our labor. We don’t just see a bookshelf; we see a monument to our own capability. The flaws aren’t flaws; they’re signatures.
For a collector, this is profound. The effort spent researching an antique, the hours invested in restoring a vintage car, the painstaking work of organizing a stamp album—this labor fundamentally changes the neurochemical valuation of the collection. The sweat equity becomes emotional equity. The hard-won prize feels more valuable because the brain’s reward for the effort has been baked directly into the object itself.
The Unfinished Sentence
The most agonizing piece in any collection is the one that isn’t there. This gnawing sense of incompletion is the Zeigarnik effect in action. In 1927, Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik observed that waiters in a Berlin cafe had better memories of unpaid, open orders than of orders that had been paid and closed. Our minds, it seems, hate an unfinished loop.
An incomplete set of first-edition novels or a nearly-full album of baseball cards creates a cognitive tension. It’s an unresolved task that hums in the background of a collector’s mind, demanding closure. The search for that final piece becomes a quest not just for an object, but for mental peace. The final acquisition doesn’t just add an item; it silences a noise.
But this very drive can push a passion across a dangerous border. While a collector curates, organizes, and displays with joy, a hoarder engages in indiscriminate acquisition, paralyzed by the inability to discard anything. A 2012 study led by David Tolin found that individuals with hoarding disorder showed hyperactivity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula—brain regions tied to decision-making and emotion—when faced with discarding their possessions. For them, letting go feels like a genuine, painful threat.
The Roulette Wheel in the Mind
This obsessive pursuit of a missing piece has a dark cousin in another domain of human fallibility: gambling. Both are fueled by the same dopaminergic anticipation, but the collector’s hunt can sometimes be twisted by the same cognitive trap that ruins the gambler: the belief that you’re due.
This is The Gambler’s Fallacy, the irrational belief that past independent events can influence future outcomes. Its most famous exhibition occurred at the Monte Carlo Casino on August 18, 1913. The roulette ball landed on black 26 consecutive times. As the streak grew, gamblers frantically bet on red, convinced it was statistically overdue. They lost millions of francs because the wheel, of course, has no memory. Each spin is a fresh start.
How does this connect to collecting? The brain’s reward prediction system can get hijacked. A “near miss”—narrowly losing an auction, finding a desired item just after it sold—can activate the brain’s reward centers almost as much as a win. This reinforces the pursuit, creating a false sense of being “close.” The collector, like the gambler, can start to feel that after a string of near misses, they are “due” for a find, pushing them to spend more time and money than is rational. It’s the hunt, divorced from reason and fueled by a brain that insists on finding patterns in the noise.
Collecting the Self
Whether it’s a Wunderkammer or a wall of Funko Pops, a collection is a story we tell about ourselves. It signals our taste, our dedication, our identity. In the 21st century, however, the most meticulously curated collection for many of us isn’t on a shelf. It’s on a screen.
From a polished LinkedIn profile to an aesthetically coherent Instagram feed, are we not all collectors now, curating our digital identity for the world to see? This is a modern mutation of the same ancient impulse. A Renaissance prince used exotic shells to signal his global reach; a digital nomad uses geotagged photos from Bali. The objects are different—intangible data, images, and narratives instead of physical artifacts—but the goal is the same: to assemble a public persona that communicates status, taste, and belonging.
Each post, each resumé update, each shared article is an item added to the collection of the “self.” The reward system is just as potent, though the feedback is social rather than material. Instead of the satisfying heft of a first edition, we get the dopaminergic ping of a “like” or a comment. We are building digital Wunderkammern where the central curiosity is, and always will be, ourselves.
The Art of Un-Collecting
If the engine of collecting is the psychology of having, what happens when you throw that engine into reverse? What if the greatest value isn’t in acquisition, but in deliberate dispossession? This is the central question of Minimalism, a philosophy that offers a radical counter-narrative to the collector’s impulse.
Emerging as a lifestyle concept from its roots in 1960s art, minimalism proposes that by intentionally reducing our possessions, we can increase our happiness, focus, and freedom. Proponents like Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, “The Minimalists,” frame their journey as an escape from the high-stress, high-consumption life that left them feeling empty despite having everything society told them they should want.
The minimalist argument is that possessions don’t just occupy physical space; they occupy mental space. The brain, it turns out, agrees. Studies have shown that a cluttered environment can increase levels of cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone. It overwhelms our visual cortex and fragments our attention, creating a low-grade cognitive load that drains our energy. By decluttering, we are literally calming our brains.
Minimalism is not about deprivation. It is the ultimate act of curation. It’s about applying the most rigorous possible filter to your life and keeping only what is essential or brings you joy. It’s a different path to the same goal every collector seeks: a life of meaning, constructed from the things we choose to surround ourselves with. For the minimalist, that construction is achieved through subtraction, not addition.
The Blockchain Cabinet
Today, the line between the physical and the digital object is blurring into non-existence. The rise of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) demonstrates that the core psychology of collecting is object-agnostic. An NFT, a unique digital asset verified on a blockchain, has no physical form, yet it can command millions of dollars.
Why? Because the blockchain provides what was previously missing from the digital world: provable scarcity and verifiable ownership. It taps directly into the same drivers that make a rare stamp valuable. An NFT like a Bored Ape Yacht Club token isn’t just a JPEG; it’s a status symbol, a key to an exclusive community, and an entry in a public ledger. It fulfills the human need for status and belonging in a new, digitally native way.
The Future of Having
Where does this impulse lead us next? As virtual and augmented reality become more integrated into our lives, our collections will likely follow. Imagine inviting friends into a virtual gallery where you can display your digital art, your rare in-game items, and 3D scans of your most prized physical possessions. The Wunderkammer of Rudolf II could be reborn in the metaverse, unbound by physical space.
This future might also force a redefinition of ownership. What does it mean to “own” an algorithm that generates unique art, or a piece of a collectively owned digital artifact? The impulse to collect will remain, but the objects of our desire and the rules of the game are set for a radical transformation.
The Paper Airplane
We return to that small, two-million-dollar square of paper. The Inverted Jenny. Its value is a fiction, a story we’ve all agreed to believe. But it’s a story rooted in the deepest parts of our neural architecture.
It represents scarcity. It represents the thrill of the hunt. For the person who completes their collection with it, it is the silencing of a nagging, Zeigarnik-fueled cognitive loop. Its value was inflated by the effort of every person who ever sought it. And for its owner, it is a piece of their identity, a signal to the world about who they are.
It’s not just a stamp. It’s a dopamine trigger, a historical artifact, and a tiny monument to a human impulse as old as our species: the profound and fascinating need to gather things together and call them our own.
[SOUND of a gavel hitting a block, followed by the quiet murmur of an auction house] [CAROLINE]: In 1918, a postal clerk in Washington D.C. sold a sheet of one hundred stamps. They were brand new, meant to celebrate the first-ever U.S. airmail service. They featured a little biplane, a Curtiss JN-4, nicknamed the “Jenny.” But on this one sheet… the plane was printed upside down. [SOUND of a single page of paper being handled carefully] [CAROLINE]: One of those stamps, a single Inverted Jenny, sold in 2023 for over two million dollars. It's just a tiny square of paper. With a mistake on it. So why is it worth more than a mansion? The answer isn't in the paper, or the ink. It’s in us. It’s in the peculiar, powerful, and deeply human compulsion to collect. And that—and stick with me here—is our grand unified theory for today. [THEME MUSIC: Upbeat, curious, a mix of strings and synth that sounds like intellectual discovery] [CAROLINE]: Welcome to The Grand Unified Theory of X. I’m your host, Dr. Caroline Wallis. Today we’re talking about why we gather, why we own, and why that one missing piece can drive us absolutely mad. And to help me sort through this magnificent mess, we have two fantastic people in the studio. [CAST] HOST: Dr. Caroline Wallis (the permanent host) EXPERT: Dr. Alistair Finch, Professor of Material Culture & Cognitive Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He’s the kind of man who can tell you the entire history of the paperclip and make it sound like an epic poem. EVERYBODY: Sal Marino, our very own sound engineer. He’s the guy who makes sure we don’t sound like we’re recording in a tin can, and a collector of memories in his own right. [/CAST] [CAROLINE]: Alistair, Sal, welcome. [ALISTAIR]: A pleasure to be here, Caroline. Though I must confess, the paperclip’s history is more of a limerick than an epic. [SAL]: Hey! Happy to be on this side of the glass. Just don't ask me about my mug collection unless you've got a free afternoon. [CAROLINE]: [Laughs a half-second too early] We might just do that, Sal. But first, the word. Okay so—I love this part. The word 'collect' feels so simple, but it has these wonderful, deep roots. It comes to us from Latin, *colligere*, which means, literally, 'to gather together.' It’s a mashup of *com-*, for 'together,' and *legere*, 'to gather.' And that root, *legere*, gives us all these other great 'gathering' words, like *select*, *elect*, even *intelligent*—it’s all about choosing, gathering ideas. [ALISTAIR]: And there’s a lovely parallel track in ecclesiastical Latin, *collēcta*, which was a gathering for prayer. So from the very beginning, the word carried this dual meaning: gathering things, but also gathering people or thoughts into a cohesive, meaningful whole. It’s an act of imposing order. [SAL]: So when I’m trying to get all the Tupperware lids to fit in the drawer, that’s… that's a *collēcta*? [CAROLINE]: [Delighted] Yes! A very sacred and frustrating one. You’re imposing order on chaos, Sal. You’re a linguistic hero. [TIMING: ~2:30] [CAROLINE]: And this impulse to impose order found its grandest stage in the 16th century with something called the *Wunderkammer*—the cabinet of curiosities. [ALISTAIR]: Ah, the 'Chambers of Wonder.' They were the precursors to our modern museums, but much more personal. They were a wealthy merchant's or a prince's attempt to contain the entire world in a single room. The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II had one in Prague that was legendary. It was this incredible, encyclopedic blend of what he called *naturalia*—strange shells, fossils—and *artificialia*—intricate clocks, man-made objects. He'd have a narwhal tusk sitting next to a mechanical sphere of the heavens. [CAROLINE]: It was a theater of the self, right? A way of saying, 'Look at all I know, look at all I control.' It was a way of organizing the world with you at the absolute center. [SAL]: So it was like the first Instagram grid. 'Here's my trip to the New World, here's a weird-looking fish I own.' [ALISTAIR]: [A dry chuckle] That is… surprisingly astute, Sal. The medium has changed, but the motivation—to project a certain identity through curated objects—is precisely the same. [TIMING: ~4:00] [CAROLINE]: Okay so, let's get into the brain. Because that feeling—the thrill of the hunt, the flush you get when you finally find that thing you’ve been looking for—that’s not just a feeling. It's a chemical cascade. Alistair, talk to us about dopamine. [ALISTAIR]: Right. Most people think of dopamine as the 'pleasure chemical,' which is a common misconception. It's more accurately the 'wanting chemical.' It’s about motivation, anticipation. The brain’s reward system, the mesolimbic pathway, gets flooded with dopamine not when you *have* the thing, but when you’re *about to get* the thing. The pursuit of the Inverted Jenny stamp is neurologically more potent than the final act of putting it in a vault. [CAROLINE]: So the chase is better than the catch. [ALISTAIR]: From a dopamine standpoint, absolutely. This also explains something called the endowment effect—the fact that we value something more simply because it’s *ours*. But that effect gets a massive booster shot from our own effort. [CAROLINE]: Which brings us to my favorite psychological quirk: The IKEA Effect. [SAL]: Oh boy. I feel seen. [CAROLINE]: [Laughs] Why does that slightly wobbly bookshelf you spent six hours assembling with a tiny Allen key feel more precious than a perfectly crafted, store-bought one? That's the IKEA Effect. Researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely did this study in 2011. They had people build simple IKEA boxes. Then they asked them how much they’d pay for them. The builders were willing to pay 63% more for their own, slightly flawed creations than other people were for identical, pre-assembled boxes. [ALISTAIR]: It’s not just about the time you sink into it. It’s about a fundamental need for competence. When you successfully complete a task, your brain rewards you. That positive feeling, that sense of, 'I did that,' spills over onto the object itself. It’s no longer just a box; it’s a monument to your own capability. The flaws become signatures. [SAL]: I have a nightstand in my bedroom. The drawer sticks. One leg is a tiny bit shorter than the others, I have a coaster under it. And I love that thing. I built it. It's *my* wobbly nightstand. My wife hates it. [CAROLINE]: That's the IKEA Effect in action! For a collector, this is huge. The effort spent restoring a vintage car or hunting down a rare book—that labor fundamentally changes the neurochemical value of the object. The sweat equity becomes emotional equity. [TIMING: ~7:00] [CAROLINE]: But let’s talk about the dark side of that hunt. The most agonizing part of any collection is the piece that isn’t there. That gnawing feeling of incompletion has a name: the Zeigarnik effect. [ALISTAIR]: Identified in 1927 by Bluma Zeigarnik. She noticed that waiters in a Berlin cafe could remember complex, unpaid orders perfectly, but the moment the bill was paid, they forgot the details. Our minds, it seems, despise an open loop. An incomplete set of anything creates a cognitive tension, a low hum of anxiety in the background that demands closure. [CAROLINE]: So finding that last piece isn't just about getting an object, it's about silencing a noise in your head. [SAL]: Like when you’re a kid and you need that one last baseball card to finish the set. It’s all you can think about. You’d trade your little brother for it. [CAROLINE]: Exactly! But that drive is also what pushes a passion toward a problem. The line between collecting and hoarding can be thin. Alistair, what’s the clinical distinction? [ALISTAIR]: Organization and distress. A collector curates, organizes, and derives joy. A hoarder engages in indiscriminate acquisition and is paralyzed by the inability to discard anything, leading to clutter that makes living spaces unusable. A 2012 study by David Tolin showed that people with hoarding disorder have hyperactivity in brain regions tied to decision-making and emotion—the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula—when they even *think* about throwing something away. For them, letting go feels like a genuine, painful, physical threat. [TIMING: ~9:00] [CAROLINE]: That obsessive pursuit, that need to close the loop, has a dark cousin in another part of human life: gambling. [ALISTAIR]: Ah, the Gambler's Fallacy. The irrational belief that past independent events can influence future ones. Its most famous example happened at the Monte Carlo Casino in 1913. The roulette ball landed on black 26 consecutive times. Gamblers lost millions betting on red, absolutely convinced that it was statistically 'due.' [CAROLINE]: But the wheel has no memory. Every spin is new. [ALISTAIR]: Precisely. And this connects to collecting through the neurology of the 'near miss.' Narrowly losing an auction, or finding an item moments after it sold, can activate the brain's reward centers almost as much as a win. It creates a false sense of being 'close' and reinforces the hunt. The collector, like the gambler, can start to feel they're 'due' for a find, pushing them to spend more time, more money, than is rational. The brain starts seeing patterns in the noise. [SAL]: That feels real. You miss out on something on eBay, and for the next hour you're just… angry. And you feel like you have to find something else to make up for it. [CAROLINE]: You're trying to close that loop the 'near miss' just opened. [TIMING: ~11:30] [CAROLINE]: Which brings us back to Sal's excellent point about Instagram. Whether it's a shelf of rare books or a wall of Funko Pops, a collection is a story we tell about ourselves. And today, the most meticulously curated collection for many of us isn't on a shelf—it's on a screen. [ALISTAIR]: We are all, in a sense, collectors curating our digital identity. A polished LinkedIn profile, an Instagram feed with a consistent aesthetic… these are modern *Wunderkammern*. A Renaissance prince used a coconut from the Indies to signal his global reach; a travel blogger uses a geotagged photo from a cafe in Kyoto. The objects are intangible—data, images, narratives—but the goal is identical: to assemble a public persona that communicates status, taste, and belonging. [SAL]: My daughter spends hours planning her posts. I thought it was just… you know, kids taking pictures. But you’re saying she’s building a… a museum of herself? [CAROLINE]: She absolutely is! And the reward system is just as potent. Instead of the satisfying weight of a first-edition book, we get the little dopaminergic ping of a 'like' or a share. We are all building these digital cabinets of curiosities, and the central curiosity is, and always will be, ourselves. [TIMING: ~14:00] [CAROLINE]: Okay, so if the engine of all this is the psychology of *having*, what happens when you throw that engine into reverse? What if the greatest value is in… not having? This is the radical counter-narrative of Minimalism. [ALISTAIR]: It’s a fascinating philosophy. It argues that possessions don’t just occupy physical space, they occupy mental space. And the neuroscience backs this up. A cluttered environment has been shown to increase levels of cortisol, the body's primary stress hormone. It overwhelms the visual cortex and fragments our attention. By decluttering, we are literally calming our brains down. [SAL]: I get that. When my workbench is a mess, my brain feels like a mess. But the idea of just… getting rid of stuff? That’s hard. Where do you even start? [CAROLINE]: Well, proponents like 'The Minimalists,' Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, say it’s not about deprivation. It's about curation. The ultimate act of curation. You apply the most rigorous filter possible to your life and you only keep what is essential or brings you joy. It's still about constructing a life of meaning from the things you choose to surround yourself with. But for the minimalist, that construction is achieved through subtraction, not addition. [ALISTAIR]: It’s a different path to the same reward. Instead of the dopamine hit of acquisition, you get the serene, focused state of reduced cognitive load. It’s trading the 'thrill of the hunt' for the 'peace of the void,' so to speak. [SAL]: The peace of the void. Sounds… empty. But also kind of nice. [CAROLINE]: [Laughs] It’s a trade-off! [TIMING: ~17:00] [CAROLINE]: And this tension between having and not-having is getting even weirder now, in the 21st century. The line between the physical and the digital object is blurring completely. I'm talking about NFTs. [ALISTAIR]: Non-Fungible Tokens. It’s a perfect example of how the psychology of collecting is object-agnostic. An NFT, which is just a unique entry on a digital ledger, has no physical form, yet it can command millions. Because the blockchain provides the two things that were previously missing from the digital world: provable scarcity and verifiable ownership. [CAROLINE]: It taps directly into the same drivers that make a rare stamp valuable. [ALISTAIR]: Precisely. Owning a Bored Ape Yacht Club token isn't just about owning a JPEG of a cartoon monkey. It’s a status symbol. It’s a key to an exclusive digital community. It's a modern-day coat of arms, displayed on your Twitter profile instead of your castle wall. [SAL]: So it’s like a country club membership that’s also a piece of art that’s also… a bunch of code? [ALISTAIR]: A succinct and accurate summary. [TIMING: ~19:30] [CAROLINE]: So where does this all go? What’s the future of collecting? I imagine virtual galleries, where we can display our digital art next to 3D scans of our most prized physical possessions. The *Wunderkammer* of Rudolf II, reborn in the metaverse, with no physical limits. [ALISTAIR]: And it will force us to redefine ownership. What does it mean to 'own' an algorithm that generates unique poetry, or to own a fraction of a collectively-owned digital landmark? The impulse to collect will remain, because it's part of our cognitive architecture. But the objects of our desire and the rules of the game are set for a radical, and frankly, fascinating transformation. [TIMING: ~21:00] [CAROLINE]: Which brings us back to that tiny, two-million-dollar square of paper. The Inverted Jenny. Its value is a story. A fiction we’ve all agreed to believe. But it’s a story rooted in the deepest parts of our brains. [ALISTAIR]: It represents scarcity. It represents the thrill of the hunt, the dopamine of anticipation. [CAROLINE]: For the person who finally completes their collection with it, it's the silencing of that nagging, Zeigarnik-fueled noise in their head. [SAL]: And its value was pumped up by every single person who ever tried to build their own wobbly IKEA shelf of a collection. [CAROLINE]: [A warm laugh] Exactly, Sal. It’s not just a stamp. It’s a dopamine trigger, a historical artifact, and a tiny, perfect monument to a human impulse as old as our species: the profound, messy, and fascinating need to gather things together… and call them our own. [THEME MUSIC SWELLS AND PLAYS OUT]
The Grand Unified Theory of Collecting
Episode Summary: From ancient Wunderkammern to modern NFTs, the human urge to collect is a powerful force rooted deep in our psychology. This episode dives into the brain's reward system, explaining why owning something inflates its value, why the missing piece in a collection can feel like an obsession, and where the line between passionate collecting and harmful hoarding blurs. Discover the fascinating psychology behind our need to gather and call things our own.
Key Topics Covered:
- Etymology of "collect": "to gather together"
- Historical context: Renaissance Wunderkammer (cabinets of curiosities)
- The neuroscience of collecting: Dopamine as the "wanting" chemical
- The Endowment Effect: Valuing what you own
- The IKEA Effect: Increased value from personal effort and creation
- The Zeigarnik Effect: The psychological pull of incomplete sets
- Distinction between collecting and hoarding
- The Gambler's Fallacy: How "near misses" fuel obsession
- Digital Identity: Curating the "self" online
- Minimalism: The art of un-collecting and finding value in less
- Modern collecting: Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and digital ownership
Referenced Studies and Researchers:
- Bluma Zeigarnik (1927) - Zeigarnik effect
- Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon, & Dan Ariely (2011) - IKEA Effect
- David Tolin (2012) - Hoarding disorder brain activity
- Nan Li & Alan Jasanoff (2020) - Dopamine and insular cortex
Books/Articles Mentioned:
- "The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love" by Norton, Mochon, & Ariely (2012, Journal of Consumer Psychology)
- "Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen" by Zeigarnik (1927, Psychologische Forschung)
- "Neural mechanisms of decision making in hoarding disorder" by Tolin et al. (2012, Archives of General Psychiatry)
- The Minimalists (books, documentaries, podcasts) by Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus
Credits:
Hosted by Dr. Caroline Wallis
With Dr. Alistair Finch and Sal Marino
Episode {EPISODE_NUMBER}