Many people crave the unexpected—and researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Emory University may have discovered why.
"Until recently, scientists assumed that the neural reward pathways, which act as high-speed connections to the pleasure centers of the brain, responded to what people like," said Read Montague, PhD, an associate professor of neuroscience at Baylor. "However, when we tested this idea in brain scanning experiments, we found the reward pathways responded much more strongly to the unexpectedness of stimuli instead of to their pleasurable effects."
In the study, published in the April 15 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure changes in human brain activity in response to a sequence of pleasurable stimuli. A computer-controlled device squirted fruit juice and water into the mouths of research participants. The patterns of squirts were either predictable or random.
The nucleus accumbens, . . . [Full Text of this Article]
