Mental as Anything

"'Financial gain actually has some of the same effect on your brain as cocaine,' says Andrew W. Lo, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'You're in a kind of stupor; you're feeling no pain.'
"He's not kidding. To quote one of his papers: 'The same neural circuitry that responds to cocaine, food and sex--the mesolimbic dopamine reward system that releases dopamine in the nucleus accumbens--has been shown to be activated by monetary gain as well.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus explores how behavioral economists view the recession.