IN A restaurant, do you order the dish you know you love or try a new one, in case you like it better? The level of the reward chemical dopamine you have in a brain region may determine your reply.
The COMT gene codes for an enzyme that breaks down dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. People with a less efficient version of COMT have more dopamine in this region, and this makes them good at storing multiple ideas in the short term.
To see if COMT affects decision-making too, and colleagues at Brown University in Providence, Rhode…
