If you're looking for a cheap, effective, and practical way to get a natural high, there's only one thing you need to do: expand your vocabulary.
Although the idea of learning a new language, reading a book, or answering crossword puzzles seems to be so out of league from eating chocolates, gambling, or having sex, a new study suggests that all these stem from the same reward system of the brain.
In an article published on University of Barcelona website on Friday, October 24, a group of researchers from Germany and Spain tackled a very interesting topic for its study: how rewarding learning is.
According to their article, our first exposure to vocabulary comes from our parents as they teach us new words and their respective meanings. However, over time, we develop the motivation to learn more about the language or to expand our vocabulary.
It turns out that learning a new word activates two very important parts of the brain. First is obviously the cortical region that is responsible for learning. The second one-and which is the more interesting-is the ventral striatum, also referred to as the rewards center of the brain. It's the one that gives us the feeling of pleasure whenever we have sex, engage in gambling, eat addicting food like chocolates, and take drugs.
But to come up with such results, the researchers worked on over 30 adults. The participants then underwent two types of activities. First, they had to extract the meaning of a new word based on context as the researchers provided them with two sentences containing the foreign term. In the second activity, the subjects participated in some money gambling. In both cases, they underwent an MRI so the researchers can see how brain activity differs in each task.
In their MRI scans, the researchers discovered that in each of these tasks, the ventral striatum's activity increased.
