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Solved: How Brain Distinguishes Fact from Fiction
Now, in a study on mice, scientists have unravelled how the brain decides what to believe and how to distinguish fact from fiction itself.
The research by neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) suggests that the estimation of confidence that underlies decisions may result because of a very basic kind of information processing in the brain, and is shared widely across species and not strictly confined to humans who are self-aware.
Having a sense of what we know -- and don't know -- is a universal human experience, and has often been assumed to be the hallmark of self-consciousness.
In a collaborative study, CSHL Assistant Professor Adam Kepecs, Ph.D., performed experiments on laboratory rats.
The researchers recorded signals from individual neurons in the rodents' brains while they were put to the test of distinguishing smells.
It was found that neurons in a part of the brain known as the orbitofrontal cortex (an area of the brain found in both rats and humans) signal the uncertainty of the decisions, "firing" much more vigorously in difficult tests compared with easier tests.
"These neurons seem to have been registering, after the rat made its decision, how uncertain the animal was that it was about to receive its desired reward. We tested several alternative explanations but the best explanation for the neural activity we observed was that these neurons were signalling the confidence of the animal about its decisions," Nature quoted a co-author of the study, as saying.
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