Free will?
Neuroscientists and psychologists have been trying for decades to better understand how humans make decisions, in the hope to devise more effective interventions to promote healthy and beneficial lifestyle choices. Two brain regions that have been linked to decision-making are the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).
Researchers at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), have been conducting extensive research focusing on these two areas of the brain and exploring their involvement in decision-making. In a recent paper published in Nature Neuroscience, they presented interesting new findings that could shed light on the neural processes through which the brain prepares to make choices.
“We previously used neural recordings to determine what was going on during decision-making,” Joni Wallis, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Medical Xpress. “We showed that OFC neurons represent the value of the options under consideration and flip-flopping them back and forth representing the value of each option in turn, as though the OFC is weighing up the two options. This flip-flopping predicts decision making: the more flip-flopping, the more likely the subject is to make a suboptimal choice or to take a long time over their decision.”
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