Genes 2 Brains 2 Mind 2 Me

Should I take the shuttle bus or the Metra?  Should I go to the big lecture or the smaller talk?  Do I eat McD’s on level 2 or do I head off-site and take my chances?  Lately it seems, these are the really big questions – in addition to the usual ones about how brains work and how they give rise to minds.  But just what’s going on under the hood when you are weighing your options (McD’s vs. off-site eating turns out to be a false choice or Hobson’s choice as I discovered today)?

A number of fantastic insights were offered at today’s session on Basic Decision-Making Mechanisms.  These speakers were fond of systems-level analyses and seemed most interested in patterns of brain activity that are correlated with performance on decision-making tasks.  Not surprisingly, there are a number of such correlates, many, it seems, residing in the lateral and medial frontal cortex.  What do these correlates do? and how, exactly, do they function to help me make the right decisions (sadly, this would be McD’s). J.T. McGuire from Princeton University showed interesting patterns of activity in ventral temporal lobes and suggested that one interpretation of these correlates was that frontal networks are regulators of circuits that carry out earlier stages of processing.  P. Stiers from Maastricht University showed that there are a common set of frontal brain areas that co-activate across several executive function and decision-making tasks – and also that these regions show high functional connectivity regardless of tasks.  Perhaps this suggests a pre-wired neural network – or at least a consortia of networks – as one question from the audience pointed out.  In some individuals, lesions can impair decision-making and C. Azuar from the Centre de Recherche de l’Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, La Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris revealed that these lesions tend to reside in the same frontal areas that are activated when healthy volunteers perform decision-making tasks – a finding that supports the  “cascade model” of decision-making.  Lastly, I enjoyed the presentation by J.J. Yoo of MIT who asked if real-time analysis of brain activations can be used to influence decisions or at least facilitate better memory of scenes.  Are there brain states that predict better memory encoding?  Her team focused the parahippocampal place area, where higher activity had been associated with better memory encoding, and then presented stimuli to subjects only when they were in a “good” brain state  vs. “bad” brain state.  This manipulation improved recall from 15% when in the “bad state” up to 22% recall when stimuli were presented to subjects when they were in the “good state”. Wow! Mind reading is for real.

Just think, at SfN 2029, we can have our brains scanned BEFORE deciding where to go for lunch!