Who among us has never had the fantasy of diving into and rolling around in a huge pile of money like the Disney character Scrooge McDuck?

The thing is, according to Kabir Sehgal, brain activity looks the same during a scan when a person believes a huge financial gamble is about to pay off as it does when a person is about to get a hit of cocaine or morphine. The thought of a financial windfall is even more powerful than the sight of a naked body.

Sehgal, in his book Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us, wrote those findings come from a new branch of science called “neuroeconomics.”  Neuroeconomics is an interdisciplinary science studying how the brain makes financial decisions and, according to Sehgal, involves neuroscientists, behavioral economists, “traditional” economists, psychologists, biologists, chemists and computer scientists. The upshot is that scientists can predict financial choices by studying the brain.

Of course, this is not the only thing in Sehgal’s book, which goes on sale March 10.

Sehgal, whose day job is as vice president in emerging market equities at J.P. Morgan in New York, covers the gamut of money from what might have been the first unit of exchange (a stone ax), to money in science and culture, how it is viewed by various religions, to what types of money people might use in space and what technology is available now and in the future.

“Coined” is an extremely readable book -- not a boring tome. Sehgal is a graduate of the London School of Economics and is a New York Times-bestselling author who has written three other books: A Bucket of Blessings, Walk in My Shoes: Conversations Between a Civil Rights Legend and His Godson on the Journey Ahead, and Jazzocracy: Jazz Democracy and the Creation of the New American Mythology.

The book took several years to research and write. That isn’t surprising because Sehgal wrote it in his free time, which isn’t a lot because he is also a U.S. Navy reservist.

The research took him around the world to, among other places, the Galapagos Islands, a Bangladesh archaeological dig, Vietnam, Thailand and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s gold vault.

It covers the history of money starting from the beginnings of society in which people began bartering that stone ax and agricultural goods. He writes about the various methods of paying a debt, the first coins, the history and cultural identity expressed by designs on money, and the origins of paper money.

Some interesting facts:

• In June 2013, $3.2 trillion was the sum of U.S. dollars in circulation, with some $500 billion in circulation outside of the United States. One of the preferred methods people around the world use to hold on to their wealth is by hording U.S. $100 bills.

• John Maynard Keynes spent at least five years scouring ancient texts searching for the origin of money.

• The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi said in 1754 B.C. that a man was not allowed to sell his wife to settle a debt.

• The slang term “greenbacks” came from the color of ink on paper money used by the Union during the Civil War and “bucks” originated from U.S. Colonial history when deer skins were used as barter currency.

• The term “millionaire” was first used in 1719 after the merger of Banque Royale (the French national bank) and the Mississippi Co., a company selling shares in the Louisiana land-development scheme. You can probably see what’s coming: The bank/ investment company went bust after the price per share jumped from 150 livres to 10,000 livres in two years and investors realized they were not buying into the Garden of Eden, but basically a hot and humid swamp.

• The reason paper money is sometimes called “filthy lucre”: Researchers found 3,000 types of bacteria on dollar bills – microbes that cause acne, pneumonia and staph infections. Dollar bills obtained from a Manhattan bank had on them 1.2 billion DNA markers with only about 50 percent coming from humans. The rest had on them viruses, fungi and DNA from horses, dogs and possibly even white rhinoceroses. Some bills had remnants of anthrax. British researchers found 6 percent of the notes they examined had the fecal bacteria E. coli on them.

Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us by Kabir Sehgal. Grand Central Publishing, March 10, 2015. Review copy had 254 pages plus 43 pages of footnotes.

William L. Haacker is an award-winning journalist and editor who has worked for various New Jersey newspapers, including Gannett New Jersey.