Steve Quartz and his research team from the California Institute of Technology were able to identify the sub-cortical activity in the brain that distinguishes gambling activity. According to Quartz’s team, humans make a wide range of decisions that require the ability to gauge risk versus reward. Playing blackjack and picking stocks are just two such examples requiring this decision-making process. Until the study by Quartz and his research team, previous attempts to identify the area of the brain responsible for making those decisions were unsuccessful, but Quartz and his team were able to work out how the very basic information-processing "subcortical" regions of the brain function in processing risk versus reward information. The study was conducted by creating a simple gambling task that, when performed by humans undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of their brains, distinguishes the "gambling" structures in the brain. Significantly, the study was able to separate the gambling function of these brain structures from other structures responsible for learning, motivation, and assessment of a stimulus. “Neuron”, a professional journal, reported that the study’s findings and experimental method could aid other professionals in the understanding and perhaps treatment of extreme risk-taking disorders including bi-polar disorders, gambling, and schizophrenia. Subjects in the experiments were asked by the researchers to choose two cards from a deck numbered one to ten. Prior to choosing, however, the subjects were asked to bet one dollar on whether the first or second card would be higher. Researchers were able to see which areas of the brain were activated during different parts of the task through the fMRI imaging of the subjects' brains. FMRI use harmless radio signals and magnetic fields to measure blood flow in brain regions. The blood flow reflects activity in those regions. During the experiments, the team was able to distinguish regions of the brain that responded specifically to either risk expectation or reward expectation. Significantly, researchers saw an increase in the level of activity in these areas of the brain when there was an expectation of reward or risk. Researchers also found that activation related to risk was delayed while activation related to reward was immediate. The particular regions of the brain identified were determined to be part of the brain circuitry controlled by dopamine, a neurotransmitter also involved in learning, motivation and salience. The researchers emphasized, however, that the analysis of their data and the design of their gambling task ruled out the involvement of these tasks, thereby proving that they had, in fact, isolated the “gambling” function. The research is important as it may aid in the development of different treatment approaches to problem gambling and may also help measure the impact on and the feedback from higher-level brain regions that contribute to the decision-making process. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and NSF Grant 0093757 supported the research. Posted on: August 8, 2006
Back to August 2006's archive |
||||||||||||
|
Del.icio.us
Digg
Google
Spurl
Furl
Simpy
Y! MyWeb