How Does Your Brain Decide Between Future Pain and Future Profit?



Imagine constantly having to choose between enjoyable activities and the possibility for harm—either bodily or emotional. Those who live with diseases like depression, anxiety, or chronic pain are generally used to making these difficult decisions on a daily or weekly basis. Surprisingly little is known, however, about the brain regions involved in these decisions.

Researchers from McGill University report in a recent study that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the ventral striatum is crucial in deciding whether to choose future pain over future gain. It's interesting to note that while pain has previously not been linked to this region of the brain, motivation and rewards have. This discovery might help treat a number of ailments marked by excessive avoidance with better therapies.

Participants in a recent study were asked to make snap decisions that involved a specific level of pain in exchange for a particular amount of profit, or vice versa, in order to determine which areas of the brain were active during decisions relating future pain and profit.

Brain scans were utilized to track the activity of specific brain regions as subjects were asked to select repeatedly (there were 100 trials) between offers of pain or profit. They discovered that whereas several distinct parts of the brain were connected to potential future pain or financial incentives, only one area—the ventral striatum—systematically changed its activity in response to potential future pain or rewards.

The researchers were able to forecast not just the individuals' responses to the offers of pain and reward, but also whether they would accept or reject them, by using machine-learning algorithms to analyze patterns of brain activity. In a sense, they were seeing the brain choose between current pain and future gain.

According to whether pain or gain was on the table, it was almost like seeing a dimmer switch move up or down, according to Mathieu Roy, an associate professor in the psychology department at McGill and the paper's senior author. We discovered that, as predicted, the ventral striatum's activity increased while money was being offered. What was intriguing, though, was that activity in the same region of the brain dipped proportionately to the level of pain being offered. This shows that the ventral striatum has a shared representation of pain and reward, almost like a common unit of account when making choices that require comparing the two.

The paper "The neuronal signature of the decision value of future pain" was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 3, 2022. Authors include Michel-Pierre Coll, Hocine Slimani, Choong-Wan Woo, Tor D. Wager, Pierre Rainville, Étienne Vachon-Presseau, and Mathieu Roy.

By MCGILL UNIVERSITY 

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