I, like most any gentleman in his late twenties, is content with lying around on the couch with a cold beer and a game on TV.  However, being in grad school, I find that such moments of respite are increasingly harder to come by.  This whole Ph.D. thing takes a lot of work.  Still, to graduate, I will do what I must.

What I didn’t know is that my attitude towards hard work may not be my choice, but could simply be how my brain works.  A brain imaging study performed by Michael Treadway in the lab of David Zald at Vanderbilt, published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, has discovered that your willingness to work hard is actually regulated by the chemistry in your brain. Continue reading →