This is How Long Term Cocaine Use Affects Decision Making
We all know that drugs are bad for you, but here's how they actually mess with your brain structure.
A new study on the long-term effects of cocaine on impulsive behavior and decision making has shown that the drug causes structural changes to the brain.
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30 cocaine-dependent subjects, who weren't using at the time of the experiment took part in a gambling exercise.
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Subjects won or lost money depending on whether or not they could guess which number would appear on a screen.
The study found that dependent users showed increased activity in the ventral striatum, which is part of the brain’s reward circuit.
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The study was presented in Addiction Biology.
Activity in the reward center was found to be increased whether the subject won or lost.
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This means that the subjects experience with a negative outcome didn't didn't discourage them from continuing to make negative experience.
There were also structural abnormalities like increases in grey matter volume.
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When the exercise was performed with non-users there was increase activity in the prefrontal cortex which is associated with assessing the outcomes of behavior.
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Non-users would reassess their behavior at this point, but users would continue to make these decisions while no activity was detected.