Different regions of the brain respond to secondary pleasures like money or primary pleasures like sex, according to a new study from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
To reach these conclusions, researchers Jean-Claude Dreher and Guillaume Sescousse proposed to 18 volunteers to sign up for an exercise in the form of a game that allowed them to either earn money or view erotic images while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. The experiments showed that both stimuli activate different areas of the orbitofrontal cortex , a brain region located just behind the eyes. The posterior part of the cortex is mobilized by rewards that respond to primary needs such as eating, drinking or having sex , older in evolution. The previous part, however, starts with the so-called secondary pleasures, such as money and power , typical of the human being, as published today by The Journal of Neuroscience . The dissociation is greater the more abstract and complex the satisfactions are.
The authors considered that the study will allow a better understanding of some psychiatric diseases, in particular addiction to gambling ( gambling ), and will contribute to the understanding of the neural networks involved in motivation and learning .
