The activity of our brain nerve cells indicates how confident we are in our decisions.
- This is the first time that a correlation between nerve cell activity and decision confidence has been identified.
- The neurons in question are located in the temporal lob which plays a role in the memory process.
How does the decision-making process actually take place? Researchers at the University Hospital of Bonn, Germany, have identified nerve cells in the brain whose activity indicates confidence in decisions. A surprising and unexpected discovery since the researchers were on the trail of a completely different evaluation mechanism, that of the subjective value that we attribute to each of the alternatives when making our decision. “There is evidence that this subjective value is also reflected in the activity of individual neuronsadvances Dr. Florian Mormann, one of the authors of the study. The fact that we instead encountered this link between neural behavior and confidence in decisions even surprised us..” They published their results on October 8 in the journal Current Biology.
The degree of confidence according to the cursor
Researchers have succeeded in identifying nerve cells in the brain whose activity indicates confidence in decisions. For this, they conducted an experiment on twelve volunteers. “We showed them pictures of two different snacks, for example a chocolate bar and a bag of crispscontinues Dr. Florian Mormann. They were then asked to use a slider to indicate which of these alternatives they would rather eat.” The further the cursor moved away from its central position towards either photo, the more it indicated how confident the person was in their decision.
In total, the participants had to decide between 190 different snacks while the scientists recorded the activity of 830 individual nerve cells. “We found that the frequency of electrical impulses in certain neurons, in other words their ‘firing rate’, changed with increasing decision confidence.reports Alexander Unruh-Pinheiro who participated in the study. For example, some fired more frequently, a sign of confidence in their decisions.”
Save future bad decisions
This is the first time that a correlation between nerve cell activity and decision confidence has been identified. The neurons in question are located in the temporal lob which plays a role in the memory process. “It is possible that we not only store the decision we have made, but also our confidence in it.says Dr. Florian Mormann. Maybe such a learning process saves us from future bad decisions.”
The study of individual neurons in humans is generally prohibited for ethical reasons. The patients who participated suffer from a severe form of epilepsy and their characteristic seizures always start in the same region of the brain. To treat it, it is necessary to specifically target this epileptic focus. For this, electrodes are implanted on the patient’s skull and distributed over the entire potentially affected area. They also allow us to better understand the functioning of individual nerve cells in the brain, as was the case here.
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