If you often take chances and yet still land on your fee then you probably have a well-developed brain.
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This surprising discovery has been made as part of a project studying the brains of young male high and low risk-takers.
The tests were carried out at the University of Turku in Finland under the direction of SINTEF, using both the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) techniques to measure activation-related and structural correlates of risky behavior, respectively.
The aim of the project was to investigate the decision-making processes within the brains of 34 young men aged 18 or 19. Based on psychological tests, they were divided into two groups of low and high risk-takers, respectively.
"We expected to find that young men who spend time considering what they are going to do in a given risk situation would have more highly developed neural networks in their brains than those who make quick decisions and take chances," says SINTEF researcher and behavioral analyst Dagfinn Moe.
"This has been well documented in a series of studies, but our project revealed the complete opposite," he says.
In fact, images taken of the brains of young men during the study reveal major differences in what is called white matter.
White matter constitutes the neural network, about 160,000 kilometers in length, that transmits signals in the form of nerve impulses and is crucial to the regulation of internal communication between the different areas of the brain.
This network is designed to analyse and transmit information in a consistent and efficient way. This is why white matter is described as containing the brain's own "superhighways."
Images from brain scans revealed that those who made quick decisions and took chances during driving simulations had significantly more white matter than those who hesitated, evaluated the situation, and opted to drive safely.
"This finding is interesting and will be important to the way we understand the brain's development and our learning potential linked to risk-willingness," says Moe.
"This will be useful information for parents, schoolteachers, sports coaches and, not least, driving instructors when it comes to assessing high risk behavior among young drivers," he says. ■