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Researchers Find Brains Gambling Area

Researchers have found in laboratory studies the " gambling hotspot" in the brain, the area that's is stimulated when making wagers and the anticipation of a reward.

Steven Quartz and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology are the people behind the discovery, through a simple gambling task that required the subjects to pick two cards in a deck numbered one to ten, and to bet on which one is higher.

The test used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on the subject's brains, and the device was able to distinguish the'gambling structure' in the brain. The fMRI imaging of the subjects' brains in the middle of the gambling task gave clue to the researcher on which parts of the brain activated during different parts of the task.

The findings were published in the Aug. 2006 issue of their journal Neuron, and the researchers said that the new information could help in understanding, and perhaps in the treatment of, certain disorders including gambling addiction, bipolar disorders and schizophrenia.

"Pathological behaviors ranging from addiction to gambling, as well as a variety of mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, are partially characterized by risk taking. To date, it is unknown whether such pathological decision making under risk is due to misperception of risk or disruptions in cognitive processes, such as learning, planning, and choice," the researchers said.

"For example, a bipolar subject during a manic episode may invest in a risky business proposition either because they misperceive the risk to be lower than it actually is, or because they accurately perceive the risk to be high but may have impaired learning, attentional, working memory, or choice processes."

"Since our task was designed to minimize the involvement of these high-level processes, in the future it may be utilized with clinical populations to determine whether alterations in risk perception accompany their changes in risky behavior. This may lead to a better understanding of the relative contributions of risk misperception versus cognitive impairments in these pathological cases, may suggest different treatment approaches, and may also gauge the impact on and the feedback from higher-level brain regions known to contribute to decision making."