A dystopian brain chip has been developed by scientists to stop monkeys from taking risks.
Researchers at Kyoto University in Japan used light flashes from the chip to speak to different parts of the brains in macaques.
A tendency to take bigger risks was triggered by turning on the light on one side of the brain, while flashing the other led to the monkeys settling for lower risk and reward.
Now, experts reckon the findings could lead to a better understanding of the root causes behind gambling addiction.
Associate professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University Veit Stuphorn was not involved in the work but wrote in an accompanying commentary: “This unexpected finding implies that two neighbouring regions in the frontal cortex together regulate risk attitude in a competitive push-pull-like fashion and can both increase and decrease risk seeking.
Monkeys are natural risk-takers and scientists started off by finding out how much this applied to the specific animals used in the study.
They trained them to choose different coloured spots with the potential of being rewarded with different amounts of water.
Some of the spots had a higher chance of giving water out than others, with larger amounts on spots that had a lower chance of yielding, MailOnline reports.
The monkeys are understood to have largely gone for spots with higher reward and higher risk.
Using the chips, however, the scientists shone light into a part of the brain called Brodmann area 6 which is a part of the frontal cortex and is involved in planning complex and coordinated movement.
