Anyone who has ever considered rolling the dice at the craps table knows about that voice inside your head telling you to stop.
Now, neuroscientists at Caltech believe they have discovered the part of the brain responsible for that fear of losing money, according to Colin Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at Caltech.
The site of the voice telling you to call it a night is deep in the reptilian part of our brain: the amygdala, an almond-sized part of the brain that's often activated by fear, he said.
Researchers and economists have long noted that we're much more motivated by the fear of losing than we are enticed by the possibility of winning.
This tendency shows up in game shows such as "Deal or No Deal," researchers say, and in foreign trades unions that tend to fight much harder to avoid losing jobs than they do to gain the same number of jobs.
The experiment gave subjects $50 that they could keep or gamble. Participants were given several offers with a 50-50 chance of winning.
Most people in the experiment would gamble if they knew they could gain four times what they were putting down, but would reject offers to double their money. Most subjects would not even gamble $15 if they could win $20.
But two key participants in the experiment had damaged amygdalas, and they behaved in a strikingly different way from the rest of the group with healthy brains: they would gamble more money than they could win. One, with the initials S.M., would put down $12 to win $10.
This study connects an aversion to monetary loss with an aversion to fear, Camerer said.
Researchers have used S.M. in many previous experiments to study the amygdala. Neuroscientists look for people who have isolated parts of their brain that don't work to better understand how that part functions in healthy brains.
When researchers show S.M. pictures of people expressing emotions, she can recognize just about every emotion except fear. When they show her pictures and ask her to identify such qualities as being attractive or smart, she can make judgments about everything except whether someone might seem trustworthy. She also lacks the sense of personal space people with healthy brains have.
"The amygdala is like this warning dog that goes off when someone gets too close to you, but her's doesn't go off," Camerer said.
All these experiments paint a picture of a region of the brain that is vigilant to fear and loss.
But Camerer notes that the amygdala doesn't necessarily have the last word when it comes to being afraid of losing money. To return to that casino scene, other parts of the brain swayed by alcohol, peer pressure or machismo can squash a gambler's aversion to loss so that they'll keep rolling the dice.
Read more: Caltech researchers pinpoint part of brain afraid of losing money - Whittier Daily News http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_14398110#ixzz0ffWZzQcQ
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