Like everything pleasurable in life, the desire to have something you don’t need (and pay big money for) is because of dopamine. Here’s an explanation by neuroscience professor Dr. Emrah Düzel.
“When we see something new, we see it has a potential for rewarding us in some way. This potential that lies in new things motivates us to explore our environment for rewards,” Dr. Düzel told Buffer.
Over time, that new object will lose its sparkle. As Dr. Düzel explained, it happens once our system gets used to it.
“The brain learns that the stimulus, once familiar, has no reward associated with it, so it loses its potential. For this reason, only completely new objects activate the midbrain area and increase our levels of dopamine.”
The page features the dining booth from the series finalé of the Emmy Award-winning HBO series The Sopranos. For fans of the show, this is where Tony Soprano, his wife Carmela, and his son A.J. shared a plate of onion rings before the screen unceremoniously went black.
The booth is part of Holsten’s Ice Cream in Bloomfield, New Jersey. After one of the most iconic endings in television history, the shop’s owners decided to put it up for auction.
"Please understand that we don't want to do this," the eBay posting reads. "But the integrity of the booths [is] now compromised. They have been repaired many times, and this furniture is over 60 years old."
According to a CNN report, 238 people tried to buy the Sopranos booth. Ultimately, it was sold for a whopping $82,600. It does not include the jukebox Tony used in that final scene to play Journey's Don't Stop Believin'.
To mark eBay’s 20th anniversary in September 2015, Time collected some of the weirdest items sold on the site. One of them is the giant fedora worn by A-list rapper Pharell Williams at the 2014 Grammys, which earned him the nickname “Hat Person of the Year.”
The hat sold for $44,100 and went to the fast food chain Arby’s. According to the company, the hat resembled one of their first logos.
Actor William Shatner is best known for his role as Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series of the 1960s. But in 2006, he was all over the entertainment news headlines for selling his kidney stone for $25,000.
The stone went to the online casino GoldenPalace.com. The company then donated the money to a housing charity, Habitat For Humanity.
