A new study by scientists from the OHSU School of Medicine in Portland, Oregon, has showed how the brain processes reward and punishing, thus opening up new way for developing treatment of conditions from anxiety to addiction, using a rodent-model to identify the specific network in the brain that is linked to risk assessment.
For making a decision, or brain first has to compare the risk or playing through several varying risks to get to a clear point; this process might be stronger in people with anxiety, where the negative outcome is considered more than in people that show “normal” or impulse and reckless behavior. This distinctions were shown in the level of coordination between a spike in dopamine neurons and activity in the prefrontal cortex: The team also discovered that close coordination between those two regions of the brain was highly active, even if there was no risk of punishment.
The team also measured brain activity in blocks of time when the rodents were given a small shock, which was administered 10 percent of the time; in contrast to the non-punishment-scenario, the coordination between the prefrontal cortex and the dopamine levels collapsed when there was a small risk of being punished, which means that the brain encoded the ingrained assessment of risk as a normal circumstance. They also point out that the balance between “normal” and “abnormal” functions of risk-assessment is quite little.
The study could help develop new medication for behavioral disorders, by reducing the anxiety or the impulsivity within the physiology of the brain.