It's in the insula

This explains alot:

The first was my nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain with dopamine receptors that are activated when you experience or anticipate something pleasant, like making money or drinking something tasty. In the experimental subjects at Stanford, this region was activated when they first saw pictures of things they wanted to buy. My nucleus accumbens just happened to respond more strongly than the typical subject’s, so what else could I do? If it feels good, buy it.

The other culprit — the main villain, really — was my insula. This region of the brain is activated when you smell something bad, see a disgusting picture or anticipate a painful shock. It was typically activated in the brains of the other shoppers when they saw a price that seemed too high. I’d like to think of my insula as particularly stoic, the strong, silent type, but he’s probably just an oblivious slob.

And it begs the question whether not just John Tierney, but quite possibly all libertarians have similar circuitry. Seems like you have to have some sort of insular insufficiency to shun sensible solutions to the problems of global warming, traffic congestion and sprawl because they might bring about some temporary pain in favor of nanotechnology, cyborg engineering and pollution-free flying cars that can only come about in the future if we get rid of all regulations now.

But hey, Tiernery's got a blog now that'll be worth a read every so often since it is a "science" blog, so go check it out. The article I linked to above ain't bad either.