Learning new words stimulates the same brain center as such long-proven means of deriving pleasure, as having sex, gambling or eating chocolate, according to a new study published in the journal Current Biology.
A team of researchers at Barcelona’s Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute and Germany’s Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg has found that successful learning of the meanings of new words activates the same core reward center in the brain as chocolate, sex, and drugs. The ventral striatum is a part of the brain activated by positive emotions.
“The purpose of the study was to find out to what extent learning a language could activate these pleasure-and-reward circuits,” study author Antoni Rodríguez Fornells told La Vanguardia, Barcelona’s top Catalan newspaper. “From the point of view of evolution, it is an interesting theory that this type of mechanism could have helped human language to develop,” added Rodríguez Fornells.
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