Neuroscience of Decision Making

This book treats contemporary topics in cognitive neuroscience and has given me a myriad of ideas to follow and think through, making it more difficult to settle on just one idea for research. I assure myself that  this might be one of the factors characteristic to creative thinking, particularly the defocused attention described by the “cognitive disinhibition hypothesis” (p.320), although I feel the stringent need to use some sort of heuristic (that will presumably activate my left temporal pathways, p.126), a kind of spontaneous thought (p. 275), which will lead me in taking the decision to elaborate just one idea for a research project.

With this in mind I choose to elaborate on the implications and ramifications of decision making in a social context, especially under the pressure of a significant person, and find that important regions lie in the prefrontal cortex having projections to and from the hypocampus, amygdala, the human striatum which is a central region of interest when researching social decisions. Another brain region of interest is the anterior insula, which exhibits a greater activation in unfair situations, an interesting point when one considers that it is also found to be responsive to physically painful stimuli (p.233).

Taking it on the “who knew!?!” aspect that each neuroscience book comprises, I have found that:

• Ventromedial prefrontal cortex is important in personal and social decision making, and impairment in this structure can make it difficult to choose friends, partners and activities (p. 74).
• An abnormal social environment can have negative consequences on the structures involved in triggering somatic/emotional states, deficits which were observed in various laboratory settings, when individuals with neurobiological abnormalities failed to express proper emotions, empathize or fear negative consequences. This negative learning can be undone when individuals are exposed to proper learning environment (p. 90).
• An acetylcholine (ACh) deficit (lack of sensory bound signals) might be involved in some hallucinatory experiences, a consistent point of the idea that hallucination is antagonistic to sensory processing(p.105).
• The ventral striatum is sensitive to the magnitude of an anticipated reward (p.151).
• A feature of depression is a diminished functional connectivity within fronto-cingulate pathways which can contribute to a diminished behavioral adjustment as a consequence of difficulties in cognitive control (p.212).
• Intranasal administration of oxytocin (a neuropeptide involved in affiliative behavior) increased trust behavior (p. 231)

These ideas were just a few of the wonderfully treated ideas presented in the book. They have harvested my interest and the corresponding neuronal pathways involved in learning and memory formation.

I must confess that writing a review, or rather a personal view of the book I carefully read and learn from has proven to be a challenging task. For any confusions or misunderstandings made I apologize in advance. 

The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making

When I received the book (that came among a collection of great books) I thought it will help me get a few research ideas stick and take me to another level. It has helped me in that sense. :)

Scott Plous’s account of some of the most intriguing and striking cognitive biases and implications of decision heuristics on everyday life has helped me rethink all the classes on Social Psychology.  From a hindsight bias “it was clear” that all the information is context dependent, that I have an attribution error, that memories are reconstructed and above all that I make prediction based on facts scrambled together by my mind in search of meaning, not taking into account some actuarial evidence, therefore setting and actuarial prediction regarding future events.

It was an informative book, and although it was written in 1993 it felt very up to date. This feeling might be due to the fact that I feel that I need to read more about decision making process and partly because I strive to make the basic ideas of research more clear and relevant to research laboratories. The fact that each chapter finishes with a set of conclusion that offer some guidance in how to avoid the negative outcome of some biases is of great help. For instance, concerning representativeness heuristic, I have to take into account the tips offered (Plous, 1993, pag. 119):

•  don’t be misled by highly detailed scenarios;
•  whenever possible pay attention to base rates;
• remember that chance is not self-correcting; and
• Don’t misinterpret regression toward the mean (especially useful when considering that we all would like to have an exceptional performance all the time).

Another set of useful suggestion is that offered in relation to probability and risk. I must remember to: - always think back at the actual probability that something I envision in my future is only a desirable event and it is no more probable than un undesirable but unforeseen event; and most importantly perhaps to break compound events into small events in order to see that is something has a small rate of probability or risk than an accumulation of small events with their respective small risks might lead to catastrophes (pag. 143-144).

The most relevant information to remember is that concerning correlation, causation and control, and to remember to take into account the illusory correlations and the invisible ones, after all, Holmes was very keen on addressing things which ought to happen and failed to be seen, not just sticking to the obvious events that might validate hypotheses.

There are many biases which seem to help or hinder us when trying to go through this motion we call life. We may be entrapped in different situations and fail to see the reward of exiting the situation just because we have invested so much that we feel as we stand to lose too much. Many times the decisions we take are not the most accurate by mathematical standards or prove to be economical correct, yet they help us in everyday tasks and therefore prove to be useful. After all, we have limited resources, cognitive and otherwise, to make the best decisions we can make.