14 DAY TRIAL // According to a team of Princeton University researchers, bad decisions might have nothing to do with faults in the brain's decision-making process. Quite the contrary: it all comes down to how free of flaws the information that the brain receives and processes (i.e. the so-called sensory input) is.
Writing in a recent issue of the journal Science, these specialists explain that, according to their investigations, the bad decisions taken by people when under various circumstances have to be attributed to errors in the information fed into the brain.
These errors in the information received by the brain are also referred to by the scientists as noise, the official website for the Princeton University informs us.
After making four volunteers and 19 laboratory rats listen to several series of randomly timed clicks which were audible in both their left and their right ear, the researchers waited for the subjects to indicate the side from which more clicks originated.
Apparently, the subjects all made mistakes only when two clicks happened to overlap, and not because their brain system was unable to properly accumulate and process information.
“To our great surprise, the internal mental process was perfectly noiseless. All of the imperfections came from noise in the sensory processes,” Senior Investigator Carlos Brody commented with respect to the findings of these experiments.
One other researcher, Anne Churchland, who was not involved in this study, argued that, “This work exposed some unexpected features of why animals, including humans, sometimes make incorrect decisions.”
“Specifically, the researchers found that errors are mostly driven by the inability to accurately encode sensory information,” Anne Churchland added.
Since most decisions are the result of gradually accumulating and processing data, it is the researchers' belief that flaws in these encoded bits and pieces of information are the ones that have to be held accountable for the fact that some decisions turn out to be poor ones.