Sex, chocolate... new language? Same pleasure for human brain, scientists say

© Reuters/Christian Hartmann

Learning new words stimulates the same brain center as such long-proven means of deriving pleasure, as having sex, gambling or eating chocolate, a new study says.

A team of Spanish and German researchers at Barcelona's Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute and Otto von Guericke University has found that successful learning of the meanings of new words activates a core reward center in the adult brain. They have recently published their findings in the journal.

The ventral striatum is a part of the brain activated by actions that trigger positive emotions, should it be sugary food, sex or drugs.

Traditionally, the process of learning of a new language was associated with a boost in the number of connections between neurons, but it wasn't proven that emotions are also involved.

study author Antoni Rodríguez Fornells told , Catalan daily newspaper.

Additionally, the scientists managed to find the correspondence between the level of myelin index, which measures brain's structure integrity, and the number of words learnt. The experiment participants with higher level of myelin were able to learn more new words.

© Current Biology

Learning new words stimulates the same part of the brain as gambling.

the lead author said.

To get these results, the scientists gathered 36 adults and conducted two magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. They showed that both language-based and gambling-like tests activated the same parts of the brain.

The researchers claim the findings could help explain the drive for the development of human languages, as well as individual motivation in studying of foreign languages.

the authors wrote.

What's more, the study could also promote new treatments for people with disorders connected with language learning.