{
  "id": 11450057,
  "title": "Stimulating the striatum changes how people weigh mental effort against rewards",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/02/stimulating-the-striatum-changes-how-people-weigh-mental-effort",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-10-02T13:40:01.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Medical Xpress",
    "slug": "medical-xpress",
    "url": "https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-10-striatum-people-mental-effort-rewards.html"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Research published in Translational Psychiatry reveals that stimulating the striatum region of the brain alters how individuals evaluate the trade-off between mental effort and potential rewards. This insight comes from a study conducted by researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and LMU University Hospital. The study utilized a novel brain stimulation technique called transcranial temporal interference stimulation (tTIS) to influence deep brain regions, including the striatum, which is known to play a role in learning, motivation, and reward-related decision-making.\n\nIn a preliminary trial, the researchers identified an optimal stimulation frequency, and subsequently, they tested 33 healthy volunteers. Participants were asked to decide whether they wanted to complete a challenging memory task for money. While performing this task, some participants received active tTIS stimulation targeting the striatum, while others received control stimulation. Brain activation was measured using functional imaging to assess the impact of the stimulation on brain processes.\n\nThe findings showed that active tTIS increased participants' sensitivity to both the size of the reward and the mental effort required during decision-making. Additionally, active stimulation led to stronger activity in the striatum reflecting the effort required by each option compared to control stimulation. Furthermore, brain scans revealed stronger functional coupling between the striatum and the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region associated with decision-making and mental control.\n\nThese results suggest that modulating activity in the striatum can influence how people weigh the potential payoff of a task against its mental demands. The study's senior author, Alexander Soutschek, notes that conventional neuromodulation techniques cannot effectively target deep brain structures like the striatum, making tTIS a promising approach for further investigating the striatum's contribution to reward-related decision-making. The researchers hope their work will shed light on the neural basis of motivation and potentially lead to the development of novel treatments for motivational deficits associated with certain psychiatric conditions.",
  "summary": "Choosing whether to tackle or complete a difficult task often entails weighing the rewards that we could gain from this task against the mental effort it will require. For instance, a larger payment could make a challenging professional assignment seem more appealing, while a small payment might convince us that it is not worth the effort.",
  "key_points": [
    "Stimulating striatum alters mental effort vs reward evaluation",
    "Transcranial temporal interference stimulation (tTIS) used in study",
    "Active tTIS increased sensitivity to reward and effort trade-off"
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}