One More Thing That Goes As We Age: Excitement

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that it’s not as much fun to win as it used to be? To find the answer, ask your competitors.
The New York Times reports that researchers at the National Institutes of Health performed brain scans on two groups of volunteers,
one in their 60s and the other in their 20s, as they played a computer
game resembling a slot machine. The paper reports that researchers found
differences between the groups both when they anticipated winning money
in the game and when they actually did so. It was not just a matter of
how much dopamine was produced, but also which parts of the brain
responded to it and how much, the study said. When a reward was
anticipated, the researchers said, three parts of a reward center in
the brain lighted up in the younger group, but only one in the older
group. Read more about it in the New York Times.
Read an abstract from the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.