It has long been known that there is a similarity between investing on the stock market and outright gambling, and that both activities require a variety decision-making activities but hitherto studies have not been able to determine the "subcortical" arise of the brain involved in such decision making. In both cases there is a weighing of outcomes and a measuring of reward various loss. Now a Cal Tech team claims to have isolated the brain structures that are involved.

In a report in the scientific journal "Neuron," Quartz’s team reports results from their experimental approach that might be helpful in comprehending and possibly treating disorders involved in extreme risk-taking such as an addiction to gambling, or even those mental processes involved with bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia.

With an improved understanding of how the brain functions with regard to the behavior of gambling, it is now possible to develop various treatment methods, and offers the possibility also of determining the level of impact on as well as the feedback that is received from higher-level regions of the brain that are already known to affect the decision-making process.

Steve Quartz’s group devised a basic gambling task that could be measured through the use of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of their brains. When measured while the task is being undertaken, it is possible to differentiate the actual, what the team calls, the "gambling" structures of the brain. What is most important is that the team’s findings can distinguish the functioning of subjects’ brains while gambling and the brain structure involved, from other similar activities involved with motivation, the assessment of stimuli and learning itself.

The Quartz team required subjects to select a pair of cards from a deck that had been previously numbered one through ten. Prior however, to making their selection, subjects were asked to place a $1 bet on which of the two cards would be the highest, the first or the second selected.

Through application of the fMRI imaging process of the brains of the subjects while this gambling task was being performed, the researchers were able to determine the exact pertains of the subjects’ brains that were being activated during the different stages of the undertaking. The process of fMRI, entails the use of safe magnetic fields and radio signals that are employed in order to measure the blood flow within different regions of the brain, thus reflecting varying degrees of activity in each region.

Quartz’s team discovered that they were able to differentiate the various regions of the brain that were responding either to the expectation of reward or of risk. Furthermore, and of importance as well, is that the level of response was seen to be an indication of perceived level of reward or risk. They found that in the case of risk, activation was delayed, but when the response was in the direction of reward, it was immediate.

The regions that responded in this test were the same regions that are known to respond to and are goverened by the neurotransmitter dopamine. This neurotransmitter, and consequently these regions of the brain, is also linked with such activities as motivation and learning. The researchers explained however, that the manner in which the gambling task was designed, as well as the data they collected, excluded the possibility of their being a link to these other functions and therefore they had isolated the function of "gambling".

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