San Francisco, Sept. 15 -- Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the University of California, Berkeley have identified two neighbouring regions in the human brain that appear to compete when a person decides whether to take a risk, and found that their activity can predict the decision nearly half a second before it is made.

As per Eureka Alert!, the findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, offer a real-time look at how the brain weighs risk against reward and could eventually help improve treatments for psychiatric conditions associated with excessive risk-taking or avoidance, including addiction, gambling disorders, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

The researchers recorded brain ac...