14 DAY TRIAL // Humans may rely more on past experiences, estimates, assumptions and guesswork when trying to find out an answer to a problem than previously thought. A new experiment shows what happens in the brain during these moments.
The fact that the human brain is prone to making errors in judgment has been demonstrated a long time ago. What scientists showed recently is that the miscalculations take place very early in the cascade of processes that handles sensory inputs.
In short, the research indicates that, whenever a clear answer is not immediately obvious from the situations people are presented with, their brains fall back to making reasonable guesses.
However, until now, it was believed that this is a last resort measure. The study indicates that this is not the case, and that the brain turns to guesswork very early on in the process of analyzing sensory data.
Details of the investigation were presented on February 27, at the Computational and Systems Neuroscience meeting. The work was carried out by experts in the United States and Japan.
In order to conduct the study, the researchers relied on an established system of errors the brain makes when it comes to analyzing how fast objects move. It was discovered some time ago that hazy-looking, badly-defined objects are processed as moving slower than they actually are.
“Things in the world don’t tend to move very quickly. They’re not running past you at 60 miles per hour. For the most part, when things are moving, they’re moving slowly,” neuroscientist Ed Vul says of this limitation.
The University of California in San Diego expert was not part of this research. He explains that this is a classic example of the type of assumptions the human brain makes automatically.
Scientists Brett Vintch, at the New York University (NYU) and Justin Gardner, of the Riken Brain Science Institute, in Japan, used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to look at the brains of volunteers as they were undergoing a series of tests in the new experiments.
They learned that certain areas of the brain can analyze speed, when the object appears clear. “It’s certainly something that’s not been shown before, that you can decode speed,” Vul comments.
When the objects test subjects saw became blurry – they had less data to rely on – their brains registered a shift in activity, from the vision center of the cortex to parts of the brain that receive sensory impulses from the eyes directly.
When this happened, subjects tended to make slower movement estimations. This is the default, “most things are slow” rationale that the human brain apparently makes, Vintch explains.
However, the team admits that more studies are needed before a clear conclusion can be drawn from this investigation, Science News reports.