to complicate things even further, when money is destroyed our brains revert to seeing simply it as a tool.
Time to think back to that night on Jura, when the K Foundation burnt a million pounds. What was it that upset people so much about the destruction of cash?
In 2011, the husband-and-wife cognitive neuroscientists Chris and Uta Frith conducted a study that might shed some light on it.4 They slowly reversed prone volunteers into a brain scanner, where a mirror angled at 45° allowed them to watch a series of short videos on a screen. Each film lasted 6.5 seconds and every one featured the same woman wearing a black jumper and sitting at a shiny white table.
The people watching the video never saw the woman’s face, but they could see her torso and also her hands, which held a banknote. Sometimes the banknote was real, but worth a lot (the Danish krone equivalent of £60); sometimes it was real but worth a lot less (the equivalent of £12); and sometimes it was the same shape and size as a banknote, but featured scrambled-up pictures (making it obvious that the note was worthless).
As the people lying in scanners watched, the woman held up one of the notes, slowly moved her fingers to the centre of the top of the note and then ripped it very deliberately – from top to bottom. The reactions were what one might expect. When the woman was tearing up the obviously fake notes, people were fine about it. But when real money was destroyed they responded to a questionnaire saying they felt uncomfortable, particularly with the higher denominations.
In many countries, it’s illegal to deface or destroy money. In Australia, such action lays you open to a fine of up to A$5,000 or a two-year prison sentence.5 These were punishments that some felt the prime minister of the country should have faced back in 1992. Paul Keating was visiting the Townsville Oceanarium in North Queensland when a local artist asked him to autograph two A$5 banknotes. He did so, was filmed in the act and a storm of outrage followed.
It turned out the artist was protesting at the new design of the A$5 note, on which a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II had replaced that of the nineteenth-century human-rights campaigner Caroline Chisholm. (As we’ll see in the next chapter such changes can stoke strong feelings.) But to add fuel to the flames, it was a time when the future of the Queen as Australia’s head of state was the subject of much controversy, and Keating was also known to have reservations about the change. Angry royalists pointed out that another man who had stamped a protest message on banknotes had been convicted, so why not this artist and the prime minister?6
Another Australian, Philip Turner, discovered that defaced banknotes were rendered worthless when he was handed a A$20 note in his change at a petrol station. Written in felt tip pen on one side was the message: ‘Happy birthday.’ (Nice – though it wasn’t Mr Turner’s birthday.) While on the other it said: ‘Suck it. Now you can’t buy anything.’ (Not so nice.) The unknown author of this two-faced foolery was right, though. Shops wouldn’t accept the defaced note, the garage refused to take it back and not even the bank would exchange it.7
Writing on money is nothing new. What better way of literally getting your message into people’s pockets? In Britain the suffragettes did it. On display in the British Museum is a penny minted in 1903 and subsequently stamped with the slogan ‘Votes for women’.8 It was a clever method of protest, as such a low-value coin was likely to be passed around a lot before being taken out of circulation. But whoever stamped the coin took a big risk – at the time, defacing money could result in a prison sentence.
What of going a step further and trying to destroy money altogether? In the United States the seriousness with which the burning of banknotes is taken is clear from the language used in Title 18 of the United States code that prohibits it under the heading ‘Mutilation of national bank obligations’. In practice, convictions seem to be rare. Desecrating flags is taken far more seriously. Across the border in Canada, the melting down of coins is banned, but for some reason notes aren’t mentioned. While in Europe, the European Commission recommended in 2010 that member states must not encourage ‘the mutilation of euro notes or coins for artistic purposes, but they are required to tolerate it’.9
But these are the rules set by institutions. How about our personal feelings about the act of destroying money? We return to the Friths and their colleague, Cristina Becchio, who together measured the reactions of people watching as Danish banknotes were torn up. The experimenters did not fear prosecution as they’d obtained permission from the Danske Bank to go ahead with the study. Even so, this destruction of money was clearly a transgressive act in the minds of most people.
As I mentioned earlier, the volunteers in the brain scanners described their distress as they watched the real notes being torn in half, but what was of real interest were the areas of the brain which were stimulated. It was not the regions usually associated with loss or distress that saw raised activity, but two small areas of the brain, the left fusiform gyrus and the left posterior precuneus. The first of these areas has been found in the past to have an involvement in the identification of pen-knives, fountain pens and nut-crackers; in other words, tools with a purpose. This suggests that the idea of money as a tool is not just descriptive. The association we make between printed sheets of paper and their usefulness is so strong that our brains appear to respond to them as if they were actual tools.
And this of course fits with the reasons many people have given over the years for feeling so upset about the K Foundation’s actions. They tend to emphasise all the useful things that could have been done with that money. They’re not, in other words, distressed at the destruction of the physical artefact (though in the next chapter I’ll show we are also attached to money’s concrete forms) but at the idea of the loss of its potential.
I’m wary of reading too much into one study, and the authors concede that the changes in brain activity could have been caused by the sheer distress of watching the money get torn up. Previous studies have found that people with damage to a part of the brain called the amygdala stop minding so much about losing money. 10 The amygdala is a walnut-shaped area deep inside the brain associated with some, but not all emotions. Such studies suggest an emotional connection with money. What’s so fascinating about the Friths’ study is that it hints at the symbolic nature of money: that we know that it can be used as a tool. It goes to show – as I’ll demonstrate again and again in this book – that when we look at, handle, or even just think about a sum of money, powerful reactions are stirred. Some good, some bad, some downright weird. But before that we need to look back to where our relationship with money all starts.
MONEY-MINDED CHILDREN
When small children first encounter money, they see it as something to value for itself. They handle a sparkly coin or a nice, crisp banknote and take pleasure in that. They quickly grasp that these pieces of metal or paper are to be treasured and not discarded, that when a grandparent sneaks a coin into their hand (it’s probably a note these days) it is something special, magical even. I’m not sure that feeling ever stops. Certainly the novelist Henry Miller, in his non-fiction book, Money and How It Gets That Way, didn’t think so. ‘To have money in the pocket is one of the small but inestimable pleasures of life. To have money in the bank is not quite the same thing, but to take money out of the bank is indisputably a great joy.’11
Recently I was in a park with my friend’s four-year-old daughter, Tilly. She’d just been given a sparkly, beaded purse that contained a few coins she’d saved. Every time a stranger passed, she waved her purse and shouted delightedly: ‘Look – I’ve got lots of money!’ When I asked her what the loose change might buy her, she had no idea. That was not the point. She had money, and money was magnificent.
How strongly she wanted to hold onto it was shown when, after half an hour on the swings and slides, she refused to return home with us. We tried leaving her behind and telling her she’d be there on her own. We tried
