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The Hour between Dog and Wolf

Risk Taking, Gut Feelings, and the Biology of Boom and Bust

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

How risk taking transforms our body chemistry, driving us to extremes of euphoria and risky behavior—or stress and depression

In this eye-opening book, Coates—a former Wall Street trader and now a world-class neuroscientist—describes the role our biology plays in our risk-taking behavior. Coates brings his research to life by telling a story of fictional traders who get caught up in a bubble and then a crash. As these traders place their bets and live with the results, Coates looks inside their bodies to describe the physiology driving them into irrational exuberance and then pessimism. The result is a riveting tale and a penetrating insight into how traders'—and indeed all humans'—bodies guide their risk taking, endowing them with fast reactions and gut feelings; but how their biology can also lead them to extremes of euphoria or anxiety and stress, thereby wreaking havoc on the economy. Coates extends his conclusions to all types of high-pressure decision making—from the sports field to the battlefield.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 16, 2012
      Far from the preserve of cold-blooded rationalism, Wall Street is dominated by primitive drives and hormonal surges, argues this scintillating treatise on the neurobiology of the business cycle. Coates, a Cambridge neuroscientist and ex–Wall Street trader whose previous studies have shown that male traders perform better when they have elevated morning testosterone levels, draws an intimate portrait of life on a trading floor, with its intuitive, rapid-fire deal making under pressure, as an almost physical athleticism directed by brain processes and chemistries evolved for less cerebral pursuits. As bond markets soar and slump, he notes, traders experience involuntary fight-or-flight reflexes, jolts of dopamine, and convulsions of the primal “gut brain.” In bull markets, the euphoric boost in testosterone from successful trades fuels ever crazier risk taking until the inevitable collapse, when the defensive steroid cortisol takes over and turns financiers into risk-averse paralytics dependent on government bailout and stimulus. Coates takes economist John Maynard Keynes’s idea of entrepreneurial “animal spirits” and grounds it in hard science, while introducing readers to a brain that’s inseparably intertwined with a very demanding body. The result is a provocative and entertaining take on the irrational exuberance—and anxiety—of the modern economy. Agent: Natasha Fairweather, AP Watt, U.K.

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

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  • English

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