Bad decisions are made by people because of faulty information and not because of the brain's faualty decision-making process, according to Science Daily.
People make various decisions everyday and these decisions are made after the accumulation of facts that support one choice or another. More often than not, people tend to make bad choices and often end up blaming the brain's decision making unit. But, a group of Princeton University researchers have found that a bad decision is because of some faulty information that a person may have accumulated and it is not the brain's decision-making process that's at fault. Researchers term the faulty information as "noise" that enters the brain.
The study was conducted to analyze whether bad decisions result from noise in the external information or if the brain makes mistakes while processing that information. Previous studies on the brain neurons found that brain functions are intrinsically noisy. The Princeton research, however, separated sensory inputs from the internal mental process to show that the former can be noisy while the latter is remarkably reliable, said senior investigator Carlos Brody, a Princeton associate professor of molecular biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI), and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
"To our great surprise, the internal mental process was perfectly noiseless. All of the imperfections came from noise in the sensory processes," Brody said.
Brody worked with first author Bingni Brunton, now a postdoctoral research associate in the departments of biology and applied mathematics at the University of Washington; and Matthew Botvinick, a Princeton associate professor of psychology and PNI.
To make better decisions, the study suggests that information represented and processed in the brain's neurons must be immune to noise, Brody said. "In other words, the 'neural code' may have a mechanism for inherent error correction," he said.
