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Now most of us are no longer hunter gatherers and instead get most of our necessities of life from the shops, so here's some advice: if you want to curb your overspending wear high heels.

When you think about it, many external factors can affect your shopping choices; you might be busting to go to the toilet or you might be in a tearing hurry because you have another appointment, but let's go a little deeper into how a metaphor can reflect how we think about an abstract concept.

So, for example, we associate height with power, and we think of a more powerful person as being in a physically higher position. As a separate example, in our minds we link morality with physical cleanliness, and in fact, studies have shown that if we think of past acts of immoral behaviour that increases our yearnings for a product to clean our skin.

So let's take it even further and consider balance — both physical balance and mental balance.

Physical balance — in other words not falling over — is a motor skill that we learn with a huge amount of effort early in life. Once we learn it, balancing becomes automatic and because we don't fall over much it stays in the background. But it becomes active if we have to concentrate on our balance, such as walking in high heels, stepping onto or off an escalator, standing on one leg, doing yoga, or tilting a chair back so it's resting only on two legs.

Mental balance appears in many different aspects of our complicated human societies. In medicine throughout millennia the dominant, but now discredited, belief was that poor health was due to an imbalance in the famous four humours. In the law, the abstract concept of justice is shown as the set of weighing scales with two pans one on each side. In chemistry, we talk about 'balancing an equation', and in accountancy we will 'balance the books'.

So it seems kind of reasonable given all this background that any activity that wakes up your normally hidden concept of physical balance should also activate your concepts of mental balance. And this brings us back to why you should wear high heels when shopping.

Professors Larson and Billeter at Brigham Young University set up a few different shopping situations in their lab for the volunteers. Typically, you had a choice between a huge 50-inch tv, an average 42-inch tv, and a smaller 32-inch tv with prices related to the size. Other three-way choices included printers, computers and cars.

Then the experimenters activated the sense of physical and mental balance in their volunteers. They did this in six different ways before going to buy stuff. So the volunteers might buy stuff online while balancing a chair on two legs only in the first study, or while standing in a yoga pose in the second study, or standing on one leg in the third study, or after walking along a virtual balance beam in the fourth.

In the fifth study, the volunteers were asked to make up short sentences using words from a list, sometimes the words were related to balance, such as stable, sure-footed, and balanced, and sometimes they were not such as green, tall, and fulfilled.

And in the sixth study, the volunteers were first asked to write a short essay. Some of them were asked to write about their typical day while the remainder were asked to write about a period in their life they felt out of balance.

In the volunteers who had their sense of balance activated, out of the three options they could choose, they would tend to go for the middle or balanced option. For example, the middle-of-the-range tv, printer, computer or car.

Now the results would vary depending upon which of the six studies they were in and what item they were buying. Typically the percentage going for the middle or balanced option was 63 per cent for the volunteers tricked into considering balance, as compared to 42 per cent for the controls.

So next time you go shopping and you definitely want to avoid overspending and you don't feel like wearing stilettos that day, try shopping on one leg to get some balance in your spending. That way you won't have to foot the bill …

ruth :

LeBon :

16 Oct 2013 3:10:52pm

Great to hear Dr Karl talking about balance again. The balance organ (vestibular system) is one of the most fragile organs in the human body. Sadly when it is damaged it cannot be repaired, it affects your vision and gaze stability and causes an awful mess to those who have damaged it so people should take real caution when feeling run down and stressed regarding diet/alchohol consumption etc, not to mention all the long list of prescription vestibulotoxic medications that can damage the organ (including some antibiotics). If you ever feel dizzy visit your doctor ASAP. I would love Dr Karl to do a special on inner ear disorders, in specific relating to Dr Marcelo Rivoltas work from last year relating to regenerating lost neurons in mice inner ear using human stem cells (something previously thought impossible). Perhaps you could get him on the show? Dr Karl meets the man trying to cure deafness in humans!

Regards

John LeBonMenieres SuffererPerth WA

PS for anyone who wants a highly detailed lecture of the vestibular system