Financial market traders and keen gamblers take note. Scientists have
found that a chemical in the region of the brain involved in sensory
and reward systems is crucial to whether people simply brush off the
pain of financial losses.
Scientists say the study points the way to the possible
development of drugs to treat problem gamblers and sheds light on what
may have been going on in the brains of Wall Street and City of London
traders as the 2008 financial crisis took hold.
"Pathological gambling that happens at regular casinos is
bad enough, but I think it's also happening a lot now at Casino Wall
Street and Casino City of London," said Julio Licinio, editor of the
Molecular Psychiatry journal which reviewed and published the brain
study on Tuesday.
"We like to believe we all have free will and make
whatever decisions we want to, but this shows it's not so easy," he said
in a telephone interview. "Many people have a predisposure to make
certain kinds of decisions."
For the study, a team of researchers led by Hidehiko
Takahashi of the Kyoto University graduate school of medicine in Japan,
scanned the brains of 19 healthy men with positron emission tomography
(PET) scans after they had completed a gambling task.
Loss aversionThe experiment showed
that a neurotransmitter, or chemical messenger, called norepinephrine,
or noradrenaline, is central to the response to losing money.
Those with low levels of norepinephrine transporters had
higher levels of the chemical in a crucial part of their brain - leading
them to be less aroused by and less sensitive to the pain of losing
money, the researchers found.
People with higher levels of transporters and therefore
lower levels of norepinephrine or noradrenaline have what is known as
"loss aversion," where they have a more pronounced emotional response to
losses compared to gains.
Loss aversion can vary widely between people, the
researchers explained. While most people would only enter a two outcome
gamble if it were possible to win more than they could lose, people with
impaired decision making show reduced sensitivity to financial loss.
"This research uses sophisticated brain scanning to
improve our understanding of the way that our appetite for risk is
linked to the way that chemical messengers operate in the brain," said
Derek Hill, a professor of medical imaging science at University College
London who was not involved in the research but intrigued by its
findings.
"It is quite preliminary work, but has many intriguing
implications," he said, adding this sort of imaging could in future be
used to help test drugs to treat people who indulge excessively in risky
behaviour.
Alexis Bailey, a lecturer in neuropharmacology at
Britain's University of Surrey, said scientists now need to analyze
known pathological gamblers to confirm whether they have higher levels
of these brain chemical transporters than non-gamblers.
"Also there is a need to investigate if noradrenaline
transporters are also increased in brain regions traditionally
associated with decision making and emotional aspects of aversion such
as the prefrontal cortex and amygdala," he said.
