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A recent study coming out of Britain finds that when the threat of electric shock looms near, humans shift from the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that governs rational thought) in order to engage the “fight or flight” part of the brain. In the study (published in its entirety yesterday in Science), volunteers played a game similar to Pac-Man, in which they had to evade a predator. When the computer predator caught them, they would receive a shock to the hand. Researchers found that as the predator closed in, the threat of iminent punishment moved the player’s thinking from rational to impulsive and primitive.
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