Brain Research Identifies The Gambling Impulse.

A research team headed by Steve Quartz at the California Institute of Technology claims to have identified the subcortical activity in the brain that distinguishes the gambling activity.

The research was supported by NSF Grant 0093757, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

According to the team, gambling, which ranges from gamblers playing blackjack to investors picking stocks, allows humans to make decisions that require gauging risk versus reward. Previous studies carried out have not been able to work out how the basic information-processing “subcortical” regions of the brain function in processing this imperative.

The team created a simple gambling task that, when performed by humans undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), distinguishes the “gambling” structures in the brain. Their findings tease apart the gambling function of the brain from other activities in learning, motivation and assessment of a stimulus.

Researchers asked subjects to choose two cards from a deck numbered one to ten. Before their choice, the subjects were asked to bet $1 on whether the first or second card would be higher. The fMRI imaging of the subjects’ brains during the gambling task showed the researchers which areas of the brain activated during different parts of the task. In fMRI, harmless radio signals and magnetic fields are used to measure blood flow in brain regions, which reflects activity in those regions.

The team found they could distinguish brain regions that responded to either reward expectation or risk. These areas showed activity that increased with the level of expected reward and perceived risk. The researchers found that the activation related to expected reward was immediate, while the activation related to risk was delayed.

These regions were part of the brain circuitry governed by the neurotransmitter dopamine that is also involved in learning, motivation and salience. However, emphasized the researchers, the design of their gambling task and analysis of their data ruled out involvement of these functions, proving that they had isolated the “gambling” function.

The better understanding of the relevant brain function has practical implications such as developing different approaches to treatment and may gauge the impact and feedback from higher-level brain regions known to contribute to decision making.

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