A new research has revealed that when individuals engage in risky behaviors, such as drunk driving or unsafe sex, its not only because their brain's desire are very strong, but because their self-control systems are not active enough.
The new study, correlating brain activity with how people make decisions, might have implications for how health experts treat mental illness and addiction or how the legal system assesses a criminal's likelihood of committing another crime.
Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, UCLA and elsewhere analyzed data from 108 subjects who sat in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner while playing a video game that simulates risk-taking.
The researchers used specialized software to look for patterns of activity across the whole brain that preceded a person's making a risky choice or a safe choice in one set of subjects.
When the researchers trained their software on much smaller regions of the brain, they found that just analyzing the regions typically involved in executive functions such as control, working memory and attention was enough to predict a person's future choices.
Therefore, the researchers concluded, when we make risky choices, it is primarily because of the failure of our control systems to stop us.
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"We all have these desires, but whether we act on them is a function of control," lead author of the study, Sarah Helfinstein, said.
The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.