Cocaine and the Prefrontal Cortex

This just in: cocaine addicts are pretty stupid when it comes to judging the relative value of money. That's what a psychologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory has found:

In one study, subjects were given a monetary reward for their performance on an attention task. Subjects were given one of three amounts (no money, one cent, or 45 cents) for each correct response, up to a total reward of $50 for their performance. The researchers also asked the subjects how much they valued different amounts of monetary reward, ranging from $10 to $1000. More than half of the cocaine abusers rated $10 as equally valuable as $1000...

Rita Goldstein, the psychologist who conducted the study, said the problem "is directly linked to changes in the responsiveness of the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain essential for monitoring and controlling behavior."