Genes 2 Brains 2 Mind 2 Me

Holiday time is full of all things delicious and fattening. Should I have a little chocolate now, or wait till later and have a bigger dessert ? Of course, this is not a real forced choice (in my case, the answer too often seems – alas – “I’ll have both!”), but there are many times in life when we are forced to decide between ‘a little now’ or ‘more later’. Sometimes, its clear that the extra $20 in your pocket now would be better utilized later on, after a few years of compound interest. Other times, its not so clear. Consider the recent ruling by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which allows employers to drop retirees’ health coverage once they turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare. Do I save my resources now to provide for my geezerdom healthcare spending, or do I enjoy (spend) my resources now while I’m young and able ? How do I make these decisions ? How does my life experience and genome interact to influence the brain systems that support these computations ? Boettiger and company provide some insight to these questions in their paper, “Immediate Reward Bias in Humans: Fronto-Parietal Networks and a Role for the Catechol-O-Methyltransferase 158Val/Val Genotype” (DOI). The authors utilize an assay that measures a subject’s preference for rewards now or later and use functional brain imaging to seek out brain regions where activity is correlated to preferences for immediate rewards. Dopamine rich brain regions such as the posterior parietal cortex, dorsal prefrontal cortex and rostral parahippocampal gyrus showed (+) correlations while the lateral orbitofrontal cortex showed a (-) correlation. Variation in the dopaminergic enzyme COMT at the rs165688 SNP also showed a correlation with preferences for immediate reward as well as with brain activation. The authors’ results suggest that improving one’s ability to weigh long-term outcomes is a likely therapeutic avenue for helping impulsive folks (like me) optimize our resource allocation. I have not yet had my genome deCODEd or Google-ed, but strongly suspect I am a valine/valine homozygote.

Indeed it seems I am a GG (Valine/Valine) at this site according to 23andMe !