When does your brain think something is worth the wait?
Whether it’s braving the long line at a trendy new restaurant or hanging on just a few minutes longer to see if there’s a post-credits scene after a movie, the decision to persevere or ditch it depends on specific regions of our brains.
Waiting is not always about self-control. Deciding to wait (or not to wait) also involves gauging the value of the potential reward. In an experiment that investigated wait times among people with lesions in the frontal cortex of the brain, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Joe Kable and his research team found that subjects with damage to certain regions of the prefrontal cortex were less likely to wait things out.
“[Our] findings suggest that regions of the frontal cortex make computationally distinct contributions to adaptive persistence,” he and his team said in a study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Kable looked for subjects with damage to three parts of the prefrontal cortex: the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and anterior insula. Their behavior was compared to both healthy controls and controls with lesions in the other parts of the frontal cortex.
