BRAIN CHEMICAL CAN PREDICT IF YOU ARE A GO-GETTER

EVER wondered what makes some to go the extra mile for a promotion or a perfect test score, while others slack off? It may be due to the varied level of a particular brain chemical. 

    Researchers at the Vanderbilt University in the US have found that amounts of the chemical, called dopamine, in three brain regions determine whether a person is a go-getter or a procrastinator. 

    Dopamine does different things in different areas of the brain. So while high levels in some brain regions were linked with a high work ethic, a spike in another brain region seemed indicate just the opposite — a person more likely to slack off, even if it meant smaller monetary rewards. 

    "To our surprise, we also found a different region of the brain — the anterior insula — that showed a strong negative relationship between dopamine level and willingness to work hard," study researcher Michael Treadway told LiveScience. 

    The fact that dopamine can have opposite effects on different parts of the brain puts a wrench in how psychotropic drugs that affect dopamine levels are used for the treatment of attentiondeficit disorder, depression and schizophrenia, Treadway noted. It's generally assumed that the dopamine-releasing drugs have the same effect throughout the brain. For the study, published in the 

Journal of Neuroscience, the researchers scanned the brains of 25 young volunteers and put them through a test to see how hard they were willing to work for a monetary reward. They would choose either an easy or a tough button-pushing task and get rewarded accordingly. They repeated these 30-second tasks for 20 minutes. 

    Some of the participants opted to work harder for the larger reward by completing the difficult task, while others chose the easier task more often and accepted the small reward. Does this choice make them lazy? "They were less motivated by this particular task. We suspect it predicts, to a certain extent, how motivated they might be in other contexts," said Treadway. 

    —PTI HAVING KIDS DOESN'T ENCOURAGE YOU TO EAT HEALTHY 

IT IS believed that starting a family will lead parents to healthier eating habits, as they try to set a good example for their children. But one of the first longitudinal studies to examine the effect of having children on parents' eating habits has found that this is not true. 

    Lead investigator Helena H. Laroche, MD, University of Iowa and the Iowa City VA Medical Center says, "Parents lag behind their childless counterparts in decreasing their intake of saturated fat, and their overall diet remains poor." The study evaluated the diets of 2,563 adults and measured the change from the baseline year, 1985-1986, to year seven (1992-1993) for intake of per cent saturated fat, calories, daily servings of fruits and vegetables and sugar-sweetened beverages, and frequency of fast food intake. None of the subjects had children in the home at the baseline year. 

    Intake of saturated fat decreased among both groups, but parents showed a smaller decrease. Finding foods that children like is described by parents as a factor influencing purchasing decisions. As marketing strategies to children focus on high fat, high sugar foods, these requests are for unhealthy foods. 

    —ANI