IN A restaurant, do you order the dish you know you love or try a new one, in case you like it better? The level of the reward chemical dopamine you have in a brain region may determine your reply.
The COMT gene codes for an enzyme that breaks down dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. People with a less efficient version of COMT have more dopamine in this region, and this makes them good at storing multiple ideas in the short term.
To see if COMT affects decision-making too, and colleagues at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, asked volunteers to stop a stop-clock hundreds of times in exchange for points. Sometimes stopping it early garnered most points, while at other times a late response did best. This forced volunteers to keep changing their strategies.
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When people were clocking up points, and so could be fairly confident in their current strategy, those with the inefficient version of COMT were more likely than people with the active version to switch strategies to try to do even better (). The team concludes that high levels of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex make people more adventurous, even when the status quo is fine.
