14 DAY TRIAL // According to a team of researchers with the Yale School of Medicine in the US, differences in the anatomical makeup of the brain might explain why some people like to play it safe and others have no trouble taking huge risks.
Writing in The Journal of Neuroscience, the specialists detail, as part of their investigation into how brain anatomy influences risk-taking behavior, they carried out a series of experiments with the help of volunteers.
In a nutshell, they had 61 people, both men and women, pick and choose from several monetary lotteries, of which some were more risky than the others, EurekAlert informs.
While the volunteers were completing this task, the researchers kept tabs on the activity patterns in their brains with the help of MRI scans, the same source details.
It was thus discovered that the folks with larger volume in a specific region of their parietal cortex were more likely to take risks. The volunteers with a smaller volume in the same brain area showed a clear preference for non-risky behavior.
“Based on our findings, we could, in principle, use millions of existing medical brains scans to assess risk attitudes in populations,” researcher Ifat Levy commented on the importance of this find. “It could also help us explain differences in risk attitudes based in part on structural brain differences,” he added.