Willing to Wait for Your Treat? Connected Parts of Your Brain Decide
Are you an icing first or a cake? Don't know about you but I always save the icing for last. It's my favorite (I could eat a whole bowlful of that alone!). I can't get over the people who scrape it off. A new study has found the specific parts of the brain involved in decisions that call for delayed gratification. Researchers discovered that the hippocampus (associated with memory) and the nucleus accumbens (associated with pleasure) work together in making critical decisions of this type, where time plays a role. The researchers showed that when these two structures were effectively ‘disconnected’ in the brain, there is a disruption of decisions related to delayed gratification. Simply put, scientists have figured out that, unless these parts of the brain are connected, we're pretty much willing to wait for a reward, but only for so long. "This is a type of decision-making that many of us grapple with in daily life, particularly the very young, ...