Which neural circuit in the brain is responsible for some of our choice

Which neural circuit in the brain is responsible for some of our choices?

(New Insight Into How Brain Neurons Influence Choices)

Summary: Neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex play a critical role in encoding subjective values. The activity of these neurons helps us to choose one option over another.

When you go to choose something, the set of neurons in your brain fires in the same way and determines the value of your choice. Value will determine which is more important to you and which is less.

ST Lewis, a researcher at the University of Washington School of Medicine, has shown that the activity of these neurons helps you make the final decision by determining the value of your future potential options. Experiments have shown that animals like a variety of juice flavors but also change their brain neural This research paper was published in Nature Journal.

It is known from a deep sense that when there is a problem in choosing these options, the decision is wrong and it leads to addiction, eating disorder, depression and schizophrenia!

In some mental and neuropsychiatric disorders, patients consistently make the wrong decision but they do not fully understand why it is! Pado Sciopa, a professor of neuroscience, said:

Eighteenth-century economists Daniel Bernoulli, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham advise that people compute subjective values ​​from different options, taking into account factors such as quality, quantity, cost, and probability. Once the value is computed to your value, Compare with each other. Nearly three hundred years later, scientists were the first to find concrete evidence to determine the value of these calculations and selections.

In 2006, Pado Sciopa and John Assad, professors of neurobiology at Harvard University, published a ground-breaking study in Nature that discovered neurons in the brain that encode the subjective value of the proposed (various possible options) neurotranscribed! This area of ​​the brain is just above our eyes which is involved in controlling the behaviors that are aimed at fulfilling our goals!

In one experiment, researchers repeatedly presented two drinks to monkeys and recorded their selection. They offered a variety of juices: lemonade, grape juice, cherry juice, peach juice, fruit juice, apple juice, cranberry juice, watermelon juice and peppermint juice. Etc!

The researchers placed electrodes in the orbital frontal cortex of the monkeys and stimulated the neurons that determined the value of each option. When the researchers gave the monkeys two drinks, they gave them a low-density current. But due to the value encoding process of the brain, the current of the lower measurement is forced to select a particular option!

In another experiment, monkeys first looked at one option and then sent a higher current to their brains before making a decision. Whenever monkeys chose an option, their value computation was interrupted, forcing them to choose the option they did not. This proves that the value computation of the orbitofrontal cortex is responsible for some of our choices!

Saturated!

References - Values ​​encoded in orbitofrontal cortex are causally related to economic choices

(Image courtesy of Scientific America.)