EASY MONEY
Would you rather earn your money or win it, say, in a lottery?
New brain research shows that while you think the rewards of cashing in on the daily numbers would be the best thing to happen to you, most people get more satisfaction from earning their keep.
It has to do with being passively or actively involved in obtaining a reward. There are short term gains—excitement--over getting money with no effort, but in the long run, that money is more important to you if it is earned.
In other words, while the 70 million dollar Powerball this week sounds cool, it’s hard work that pays off in the long run, at least in terms of satisfying the parts of the brain involved in pleasure.
The new study out of Emory University shows brain activity in a key pleasure center is stimulated more when cash is earned rather than just obtained with no effort. Study volunteers were asked to lie in an MRI unit, getting scanned while performing tasks on a computer.
They used a special type of MRI called functional MRI, which can measure brain activity, specifically, in the area of the brain called the striatum. The striatum is the part of the brain associated with reward processing and pleasure.
In the experiment, study subjects were asked to watch images of dollar bills as they popped up onto a screen. There was also a money bag on the screen. If the money fell into the bag, the person won real money.
On one task, the subject had to press a button to make the money fall into the bag. This was the so called “active” part of the experiment. In another, the money just fell on its own into the bag, and required no action on the part of the participant. In other words, the person got the money passively, as in the lottery.
Dr. Greg Berns, the lead researcher, said, “The part of the brain we’re focusing on is most active when people pressed a button to bank a dollar bill. Which seems somewhat surprising because it’s not really very hard, all they had to do was press a button, but the mere fact that we changed their motivational state, to essentially bank that dollar bill is enough to activate this part of the brain which wasn’t as active as when we just gave them a dollar bill.”
Ciara Caltagirone was one of the study subjects who says she plays the lottery in real life. She said, “I think there is a reward for getting something for nothing, certainly winning money I would say is rewarding personally. Of course the novelty may wear off.”
That’s exactly the point researcher psychiatric researcher Dr. Greg Berns believes the study makes. The research finds that while some reward centers of the brain “lit up” whenever the money was received, this very important pleasure center was activated only when the participants were actively involved in receiving the reward. While pleasurable things like winning money do activate it, Berns says, the effects on the striatum are short-lived. Long term-stimulation of the pleasure centers, or motivation centers, that satisfy the brain, are obtained through tasks. “The two things that are most important for this part of the brain are doing something and doing something novel,” Berns states.
That’s why Ciara would still want to be motivated to do something even if she struck it rich. “I would still work if I won the lottery,” says Ciara. “I would want to use my brain and do something productive.”
According to this research, that’s what one’s brain wants…it seeks pleasure through the motivation to perform useful tasks in ones life and experience new things in life.
This major pleasure center will seek out other ways to be stimulated, which is why people, even after retirement, seek to be active and engaged. Living the easy life isn’t necessarily what provides happiness. “The brain wants information and it wants new stuff and it wants to do things,” Dr. Berns says.