Your Experience, Your Genes

Some people insist that a place to eat is really good because that's what they've been told, even if their meal there wasn't very good, and that may be partly due to what version of the COMT gene, which is involved in dopamine transmission, those people have, reports Katherine Harmon at Scientific American. A new paper published online in The Journal of Neuroscience tested more than 70 people, using a computer-based program, to determine whether they rely on their own experiences or others' instructions to make their decisions. "People with an exceptional ability to spot inaccurate instructions and start making decisions using their own experience tended to have the Val/Val version of the gene, whereas those who needed 'greater confidence' that their experience was telling them to jettison earlier advice were more likely to have the Met allele," Harmon writes.