DalaZine December 2014 | Page 10

In other words, boosting your vocabulary can be just as good as having sex or getting high.

"The aim of the study was to find out to what extent learning a language could activate these pleasure and reward circuits," lead author Antoni Rodríguez Fornells told Catalan paper La Vanguardia. "From the point of view of evolution, it is an interesting theory that this type of mechanism could have helped human language to develop."

While opening up a dictionary might not seem as fun and exciting as eating chocolate or having sex, a new study suggests it might be. - www.mic.com

According to the study, published in the journal Current Biology, researchers in Spain and Germany have found that expanding your vocabulary activates the ventral striatum, a reward-processing part of the brain involved in pleasurable activities such as sex, gambling, doing drugs or eating good food.