The bigger your parietal cortex, the bigger the risk you’ll take

A Yale team led by Ifat Levy, Ph.D., assistant professor in comparative medicine and neurobiology, reported in the Journal of Neuroscience in September that people who have larger volume in a particular part of the parietal cortex are willing to take more risks than those with less volume. “Based on our findings, we could, in principle, use millions of existing medical brain scans to assess risk attitudes in populations,” said Levy. “It could also help us explain differences in risk attitudes based in part on structural brain differences.”