The ability to sense imminent danger and avoid pain is one of the oldest and most important survival strategies in man. Researchers have previously identified a part of the brain which responds to pain - something they believe allows us to predict imminent harm and respond to danger defensively.

Researchers from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London say that the region of the brain that responds to pain and fear, called the striatum, is also involved in predicting and responding to financial losses. They studied 20 subjects with fMRI while they played a gambling game to win money. Subjects accurately learned to predict when there was a chance of winning or losing money and this learning took place in the striatum.

“This provides a sort of biological justification for the popular concept of ‘financial pain’,” says Dr Ben Seymour, lead author of the study.

Why losing money may be more painful than you think