Professor to study risky behavior with science grant

An IU neuroscientist will soon begin research on how and why people make risky decisions.

The National Institutes of Health awarded a two-year, $683,736 grant to Joshua Brown, assistant professor in the IU Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

The NIH grant, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will allow Brown to study how certain areas of the brain can factor into a person’s decision to partake in risky behavior.

Brown, who has been a professor at IU for three years, will perform his research in the Cognitive Control Laboratory in the Psychology Building. Three post-doctoral fellows and several graduate and undergraduate students will also work on the project.

The brain can be divided into tens of thousands of small areas, Brown said. Using functional MRI and computer technology, Brown can track how some areas become more active when a risk is taken.

In his research, Brown gives people choices that involve money. Subjects are free to choose between a small amount of money, without risk, or a large amount, with risk. If a person chooses to gamble for the larger amount, they could lose everything.

People who are willing to gamble tend to be more likely to take other risks, such as using drugs, Brown said.

Brown’s research will focus on the brain, disregarding outside factors such as environment and upbringing.

Sometimes researchers need to “focus on one piece of the puzzle,” psychology professor Peter Finn said.

“The more you know about the particular brain areas that are involved, the better prepared we are to design treatments that are aimed to target those brain areas,” Finn said.

Brown said he hopes to learn how the brain functions in decision-making and how its circuitry is changed in people dependent on drugs or alcohol.

When brain activity in people who abuse substances is measured, it’s almost as if the drugs control the function of certain parts of the brain, Brown said.

“When people are faced with a difficult situation, subjectively you experience a kind of deliberation,” Brown said.

Easy, habitual decisions such as food choices tend to involve much less deliberation than difficult decisions, he said.

Risk-taking is an important factor in society, said Adam Krawitz, a post-doctoral fellow who will assist Brown.

“We hope that this knowledge can actually be used to help with treating addictions,” he said. He said he hopes it will provide a better understanding of why people make decisions that might be harmful.

While Brown hopes to come up with explanations for people’s decisions and contribute to the creation of addiction treatments, his research can also serve a preventative purpose.

The “Just say no” and similar anti-drug advertisements could be more effective if researchers knew how they affect the brain, he said.

Once that is discovered, businesses, advertisers, public health services and other industries will be able to better direct meaningful messages to consumers.

“Now you can start to bypass people’s self-report and measure directly how their brain is responding to messages like that,” Brown said.