The UC San Diego bookstore sells a lot more than books. Here you also find office supplies, electronic devices and lots of hats and sweaters emblazoned with "UCSD."
This is where I met neuroeconomist and professor at UCSD's Rady School of Management, Uma Karmarkar.
"So if I'm thinking about what someone might be doing when they're browsing I could come across a display like this," Karmarkar said, randomly selecting one part of the store. "And it could be that the thing that I like best is, maybe that surfboard T-shirt over there."
The stores where we buy holiday gifts are a landscape of neural stimulation that may or may not entice us to spend our money. Karmarkar has used MRI brain scans and eye movement trackers to understand what people observe and how people decide what to buy.
She wants to understand your brain on shopping.
Reward impulses fire in the ventral striatum, what she calls the "I like it" part of the brain. The choices we can make at a place like the UCSD Bookstore are virtually endless.
Karmarkar said we're "averaging" all of the items we see in a store. Maybe you figure they're all about seven out of 10 on the scale but you want to find that thing that's 10 out of 10. When we shop, context and environment play a big role.
"We're processing so much information. So there's the lighting and the other shoppers and even just all the different products sitting around, and that's a tremendous amount of work for your brain to do," Karmarkar said.
In the retail landscape she said the brain is taking it all in, seeing utility, emotional rewards and maybe some great deals. She said retailers are likely to hide the price tag if it's the kind of product you may fall in love with.
Let them worry about the price later.
If we have a gift idea, we're less likely to buy it if we see it surrounded by a wide variety of stuff.
"So if I see a sweatshirt with other sweatshirts. I'm getting the impression that I'm making a sweatshirt decision. I'm more likely to buy a sweatshirt when it's with similar types of items," Karmarkar said.
Roger Hailstork, director of the UC San Diego Bookstore, said they have some ways of getting a product into a shopper's head. Especially something that's not moving off the shelves.
"We'll try to put it in our designated traffic patterns, which are kinda the front of the story or along our aisle walking to the back of the store. We will reconsider something if we think it's a good seller," Hailstork said.
Karmarkar said retailers may not want to hide the price tag if the item is not something you'd fall in love with but may be a good value. A pack of batteries, for instance.