The researchers had subjects make decisions regarding the expense of making certain purchases while undergoing fMRI scanning of their brains, and discovered that “the insula, a section of the brain associated with pain processing, activated when subjects saw prices that were too high…”, as described by one of the team. An interesting conclusion, but I think it does not prove that paying causes “pain” in a neurologic sense as much as a metaphoric one, which we already knew. In other words, it’s semantics — if you note that the insula lights up both with a physical pain experience and when confronted with a high price, couldn’t you just as readily conclude that the insula is activated with several different types of distress, one of them being pain and the other fiscal distress? [thanks, Joel]

The insula, by the way, is also implicated in another experience we, metaphorically, also call ‘pain’, which is the distress of withdrawal in addiction. I wrote several months ago about a cigarette-smoking patient who suffered an insular stroke and found he no longer craved nicotine.