Cocaine addicts make lousy gamblers, at least, according to the latest scientific study of the brain’s reward center.
New research published in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging demonstrates that cocaine addicts tend to make riskier choices than non-addicts following a gambling loss.
Researchers gathered 29 cokeheads with 40 control subjects, then subjected them to a Risky Gains Task, in which participants were offered three choices, with the safest option offering the smallest monetary reward and the riskiest choice offering the biggest potential payday. Gizmos monitored the participants’ brains for levels of neuro-activity.
Overall, researchers found both addicts and non-addicts chose riskier options at similar frequencies but the addicts took more risks after losing out on a potential reward. Interestingly, while making these riskier choices, the addicts’ brains didn’t display the same increased levels of activity in their ventral striatum, the brain’s reward center.
In other words, the addicts showed a heightened sensitivity to loss despite the fact that their risks weren’t motivated by reward, as was the case for the non-addicts. Study author Joshua Gowin of UC San Diego suggested that this “paradoxical relationship” could offer clues on how to develop better interventions for cocaine addicts.
Since the addicts were chosen after they’d already developed their coke habits, scientists say they can’t say whether these brain activity patterns weren’t set before the addicts became addicts.
However, the study did suggest a direct relationship between lifetime cocaine use and activity of the anterior cingulate cortex during risky decisions, which suggests a direct line (pardon the pun) between substance abuse and neural processing of risk.
This isn’t the first study that suggests doing rock star rails is a really bad betting system. Mount Sinai researchers have determined that cocaine impairs the brain’s ability to predict losses, possibly due to the fact that the addicted gambler won’t shut up long enough to calculate the odds of winning.
