A Regretful Life

Remember the last time you stayed up till 5 AM playing Call of Duty with your friends, knowing that you had class the next day? You know that you shouldn't be playing but your friends keep saying "come on, one more game". The next day, you were so exhausted that you ended up sleeping through an important class. You sit there pondering, criticizing yourself for your decision making. In that moment, as you sit there reevaluating your life, you are feeling the sensation of regret. Regret is a strange yet fascinating thing to me. When you were playing the video game, you were receiving some sort of positive stimuli that led you to stay up until 5 AM. However, you did this knowing good and well that you would most likely miss class the next day. For some reason the negative stimuli you receive from missing class outweighs the enjoyment you received from playing the game. In Dr. Sweis's research, they studied how one experiences regret. They observed that rats also displayed this moment of regret. They noticed that when the rats were expressing regret, that neuronal activity in the brain was heightened in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). In a recent study done by Cornell University neuroscientist Adam Anderson, it was discovered that this region of the brain also plays a crucial role in emotional processing. "We discovered that fine-grained patterns of neural activity within the orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with emotional processing, act as a neural code which captures an individual’s subjective feeling,” says Anderson. For the study, the researchers presented the participants with various images  and tastes while they were undergoing neuroimaging. The researchers discovered that depending on how the participants felt after viewing or tasting something, it resulted in a similar pattern of neuronal activity in the OFC. This shows that the brain has a certain code regarding our emotions. The pattern of activity in our brain correlates with experiences of pleasure or displeasure. They also learned that these activity patterns are shared across people. This to me is very interesting given the OFC's involvement in our feeling of regret. My question would be how these two mechanisms interact yet differentiate from each other? Often times, we regret things that give us some sort of positive experience. Going back to the previous example, a person regrets staying up all night playing video games even though this is something that to them is a pleasurable experience. At the same time however, the feeling of regret is one that is a negative experience. This is interesting because I wonder how the OFC differentiates in its neuronal activity pattern when we feel a positive emotion yet are also feeling regret at the same time. Also, in Dr. Sweis's study it also mentioned that individuals who have damage to their OFC often have trouble feeling regret. For example, in the research paper it mentions that people with OFC damage responded differently from normal individuals when put in a situation where they had to gamble. An individual with an inability to regret would most likely not be able to control the amount of money they gamble away. In terms of this, it would be interesting to see how a damaged OFC would affect how that person perceives positive or negative experiences. Often times a person feels compelled to gamble because it brings them some sort of pleasure. But if, hypothetically, they don't feel this positivity from gambling it would obviously affect their decision making. In general, it is remarkable to me how such a small region of the brain such as the OFC has so many functions and capabilities. It's interesting to me how we as humans make so many decisions that we go on to later regret. Often times we sometimes make the same mistakes over and over again when we are faced with similar situations. We then regret the mistakes we have made. So just remember, the next time you choose video games over going to class, your OFC will later tell you that it was a bad decision. I hope you did not regret reading this.

Work Cited

Bissonette, G. B., Bryden, D. W., & Roesch, M. R. (2014). You won't regret reading this. Nature Neuroscience Nat Neurosci, 17(7), 892-893.

Study cracks how the brain processes emotions. (2014, July 10). Retrieved March 05, 2016, from http://www.neuroscientistnews.com/research-news/study-cracks-how-brain-processes-emotions