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

If risk-taking is something you usually avoid, you’re not alone. Most people are twice as sensitive to potential losses than they are to potential gains, which leads to risk aversion. In the Jan. 26 issue of the journal Science, UCLA psychologists present the first neuroscience research comparing how our brains evaluate the possibility of gaining versus losing when making risky decisions.

Researchers using funtional MRI studied brain activity in study participants as they weighed bets, varying the odds and winnings.

“Looking at how your brain responds to potential gains versus potential losses, we can predict how risk-averse you are going to be in your choices,” said study co-author Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology, who holds UCLA’s Wendell Jeffrey and Bernice Wenzel, Term Chair in Behavioral Neuroscience. “Brain activity predicts behavior.”

When we think about possible gain, reward centers in the brain get turned on. However, when weighing potential losses, regions of the brain that process fear and anxiety, such as the amygdala and the insular are not activated.

“What we found instead,” Poldrack said, “is you don’t turn anything up. You turn down the reward areas of the brain, and you turn them down more strongly for losses than you turn them up for gains. Just as people respond more strongly to a $100 potential loss than a $100 potential gain, the brain responds more strongly to a $100 potential loss versus a $100 potential gain.”

Read the full press release:
How Does Your Brain Respond When You Think about Gambling or Taking Risks? UCLA Study Offers New Insights