When you see successful entrepreneurs or managers, people unusually successful at dealing with financial risks, you know you’re looking at the product of hard work and careful planning. But are you also seeing people whose innate hardwiring made them more likely to be winners at this particular game?

Probably.

The past several decades of research into human brains have included deep looks at how people deal with risk. Scientists say they have discovered neural pathways, maps of the mind, that seem to correlate with the kinds of people who deal well with, more particularly, financial risk.

These links are far from iron-clad. Even the very definition of risk gets pulled apart by academics. But there are some interesting experimental results that seem to show a natural range in daring behavior that may be as wide as the range of people born with the ability to catch up with a fastball.

Consider the role fear plays in how we approach risk. Could anybody jump from a plane, climb a mountain, or gamble the mortgage money on a business venture if they were paralyzed by fear?

Some neuropsychologists speculate that the very ability to feel fear is bound up in the amygdala, a pair of almond-shaped regions deep inside the brain.

A report in last December’s edition of the journal Current Biology reported the curious case of a woman referred to as SM whose amygdalas had been destroyed. She now has no fear, though many of her other emotional responses are normal. Maybe the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world have amygdalas that push with a little less force than the rest of us?

Jane Joseph is Director of the Neuroimaging Division of the Medical University of South Carolina and part of a research team that has given people psychological tests, then scanned their brains while they played a variety of gambling-style games. The scientists looked at how test subjects dealt with ambiguity.

For people who test as “ambiguity-averse,” larger and larger portions of their brains light up on the scans as they try to figure out the best strategies, she says. It is as if they instinctively recruit more and more neural reinforcements in an attempt to think their way through the uncertainties associated with risk.

In a business environment, these people may be slower to pull the trigger. For the “ambiguity-tolerant,” that recruitment of more and more neurons cuts off—it’s as if these brains hit a point where they say “that’s as good as it gets.” They aren’t waiting for information that may never show up.