Decision Making

I saw some polaroid cameras for sale last week on an online camera site and it threw me into a dilemma. Buy? Yes? No?

Well money's not an issue here, it will just set me back a couple of hundred bucks but a voice deep behind my kneecaps said (well the voice used to be in my head, but I banished it somewhere else so I can overrule it more often than it can do me) I should not just buy for the sake of it being cheap. Then I realized that we're talking about a polaroid here, a legend in its own right! Having this is my collection will be awesome! Ok hang on, will I have the space for this? Or even the time to use it? I mean look at it, its bulky! While it may not beat my Olympus Trip in weight and ease of use, but surely I've seen the wonderful photos it is capable of producing, right? And not to mention the instant photos I'll be able to file in my journals and all. Oh ho ho, I say that but will I be able to get the films easily? How many vendors carry that nowadays?

Deadlock.

So I tried taking my mind of it and did some mindless net surfing, and as fate would have it I came upon this Newsweek article titled 'The Science of Making Decisions.' In short, it mentions the importance of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC, the part of the brain behind our foreheads) in making decisions.

The more complex the problem, the more activity there will be in the DLPFC when looked under a fMRI scan. But with too much information and overANALysis, the DLPFC short circuits and that's when people are more prone to making errors and bad decisions.

So with this information, my next course of action was to sleep on the issue and not give it too much thought for the time being.

END RESULT? After a few days I decided that I really didn't need the camera. What I have in my collection is currently more than enough for me. Ok truth be told, they sold out all the models already...crap! So in a way, this sleeping over the problem thing does help.  Now iPad 2...hmmm....