HomeScience and ResearchScientific ResearchHow Our Brains Make Choices Without A Right Or Wrong Answer?

How Our Brains Make Choices Without A Right Or Wrong Answer?

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Understanding how the brain makes certain choices could provide valuable insights into neurological disorders such as addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is because these conditions often involve individuals repeatedly making the same choice, which ultimately harms them.

Cedars-Sinai researchers have identified the brain regions responsible for decision-making in situations where there are no right or wrong choices. Their latest study sheds light on how the brain weighs value-based decisions, from selecting a lunch spot to choosing which slot machine to play.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Human Behaviour, the study used single-neuron recording to monitor the activity of individual human neurons, offering unprecedented insights into the brain’s decision-making process.

According to Ueli Rutishauser, PhD, the senior author of the study, director of the Center for Neural Science and Medicine, and professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Biomedical Sciences at Cedars-Sinai, the study focused on value-based decisions, which do not always have a clear right or wrong option.

“Learning how the brain makes these kinds of choices could help us better understand neurological disorders including addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Rutishauser adds, “because all of these conditions can involve a person making the same choice over and over to their detriment.”

The study enlisted 20 volunteers who were patients with epilepsy, undergoing hospitalization for seizure monitoring. By recording the activity of individual neurons in their brains, researchers observed how the participants made value-based choices during a simulated slot-machine game called the “two-armed bandit.” In this game, the participants were presented with two options of simulated slot machines and were asked to choose one by pushing a button. The bandits had unique markings to help the participants keep track of the ones they had already played. Over a 30-minute period, they played several rounds of the game.

According to Rutishauser, making value-based choices involved considering certain factors:

  • Familiar options: “If participants had chosen a bandit several times before, they had a fairly good idea of how often it was a winner.”
  • Uncertain options: “For bandits they had only played a few times, participants were less certain of their prospect of a win.”
  • New options: “When a new bandit appeared for the first time, participants had to decide whether to choose a familiar bandit or risk choosing a new one. Sometimes it just feels good to do something new, and that has its own intrinsic value.”

Prior research that utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to track brain activity indicated that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was the primary brain region involved in weighing the factors behind value-based choices.

However, the new study by Cedars-Sinai investigators, which used single-neuron recording, revealed that a different area of the brain, the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA), takes the lead. Although the vmPFC registered the novelty of new bandits that appeared, the pre-SMA calculated which option was most likely to provide the highest reward, and this signal guided the participants’ choices.

“Previous studies weren’t giving us a complete picture and couldn’t draw the distinction we could here,” adds first author Tomas Aquino. “Since our single-neuron recordings are more sensitive than other, more common methods, we could measure directly how preSMA neurons compute the value of each option and determine participants’ choices.”

Both the vmPFC and the pre-SMA are part of the brain’s frontal lobe and have been linked to planning and decision-making, but for the first time, researchers were able to disentangle their functions in this study. This new study adds to a number of previous recent discoveries demonstrating that pre-SMA is crucial to human decision-making.

“The unique window into the human brain that is opened by these single-neuron recordings continues to deepen our understanding of the precise mechanisms behind cognitive processes,” adds co-author Adam Mamelak. “These continued gains in understanding are the key to finding new treatments for complex neurological disorders and improving the lives of patients.”

Source: 10.1038/s41562-023-01548-2

Image Credit: Getty

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