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With all the recent gyrations on Wall Street (Bear Stearns goes from $60 to $2 a share in three days and the DOW rockets up 400 points today), it's got to make you wonder about all the adrenaline and hormones pumping away in Lower Manhattan:

A small group of scientists, including some psychologists, say they are starting to discover what many Wall Street professionals have long suspected - that people are hard-wired for money. The human brain, these researchers say, responds to high-stakes trading just as it does to the lure of sex. And the riskier the trades get, the more the brain craves them.

That is no surprise to Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University and a pioneer in neurofinance, an emerging field that combines psychology, neuroscience and economics, to examine how the brain makes decisions.

Mr. Knutson has sent volunteers through high-power imaging machines to map their brains as they trade. He concludes that sometimes, people get high on making money.

Sex and money, eh? Almost like sex and politics, no?

Maybe it's more like drugs:

Last year Jason Zweig, who edited the 2003 edition of "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham, wrote a 352-page book entitled "Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make Your Rich."

One of his findings was that brain images of drug addicts who are about to take another hit are indistinguishable from those of traders who are making money and about to place another trade. "That tells us pretty confidently that if you make money and make money again," Mr. Zweig said, "it is very similar to a chemical addiction and it becomes very hard to let go."

Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll? It's more like, Sex, Drugs & Money...and survival:

"When you are threatened with extinction, you act like nothing matters," said Andrew Lo, a professor at M.I.T. who has studied the role of emotions in trading.

Mr. Lo and Dmitry V. Repin of Boston University have studied traders to determine how stress and emotions affect investment returns. They monitored traders' vital signs like heart rate, body temperature and respiration as their subjects darted in and out of trades.

The findings, while preliminary, suggest - perhaps unsurprisingly - that traders who let their emotions get the best of them tend to fare poorly in the markets. But traders who rely on logic alone don't do that well either. The most successful ones use their emotions to their advantage without letting the feelings overwhelm them.

Or as Warren Buffet has so simply remarked, "Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing."

It certainly seems like Wall Street is not controlling its temperament these days, that's for sure.

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