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How Your Brain Figures Out What It Doesn't Know
hex0D passes along an article at NPR about a study that examined the biology behind the self-assessment of knowledge. Quoting:
"We isolated a region of the prefrontal cortex, which is right at the front of the brain and is thought to be involved in high-level thought, conscious planning, monitoring of our ongoing brain activity,' Fleming says. In people who were good at assessing their own level of certainty, that region had more gray matter and more connections to other parts of the brain, according to the study Fleming and his colleagues published in the journal Science."
They should have correlated the study's participants with their preferred political party.
So my brain didn't know that my brain didn't know...that my brain didn't know... break;
Nope.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
In The Science of Fear (a book I heartily recommend), Daniel Gardner claims the strength of our "feeling of knowing" generally has no statistically significant correlation with factual reality. Humans are not very good at "knowing." and our most cherished concepts of "truth" may be unverifiable or demonstrably false.
Which is why, paradox intended, a person who knows he knows nothing is wise.
.... there's an anatomical explanation for who is ignorant. If it takes an autopsy to arrive at the proper conclusion, I'm fine with that. Shoot them all and let the coroner sort them out.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well, at 3 weeks prior to the most important professional exam of my career, I appear to be posting on Slashdot.
I hereby donate my brain to medical science so that the lesion present in my prefrontal cortex can help pinpoint this area more precisely.
...for not linking the NPR article -- and for linking the same paywalled article twice. Good job. Is this what you were going for?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/09/16/129910351/how-your-brain-figures-out-what-it-doesn-t-know
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/09/16/129910351/how-your-brain-figures-out-what-it-doesn-t-know
Bill: "So-crates . . . the only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing."
Ted: "That's US, dude!"
Bill: "Oh, yeah!"
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
I like this.... I think..
So in the future, they'll demand a scan of your forehead, and if that region isn't large enough, you'll not get employed?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The study mentioned at the end of the NPR article with this quote: "In fact, there was one study where people who are narcissistic would say they are really spectacularly good at this and they were actually worse than everyone else" is referring to Unskilled and Unaware of It (scanned pdf). The Unskilled study covers regular people too, not just us narcissists.
What you don't know you don't know.
They said that the region they are talking about is behind the eyes ... and then ...
"Participants had to identify a patch of screen that was just slightly brighter than the rest of the screen. And every time they did this they had to say how confident they felt about their choice."
Maybe those people just had better visual processing ? o_O
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Think impressionist paintings with thick strokes. You have to take a few steps back to see them clearly. I think the same thing applies to decisions and planning; they're difficult to make because the one making them is too close, too attached to the situation.
Years ago, I made some poor decisions. A few years later I saw how stupid they were and I thought "Ah, if only I had been as wise as I am now, I would have made good decisions back then". What I think now is I never got a lot wiser; it's just the detachment that makes one see things more clearly.
Anyone with a fully functioning prefrontal cortex knows this.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
...what you know that you don't know?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The ability to introspect about self-performance is key to human subjective experience, but the neuroanatomical basis of this ability is unknown
Error correction is important; but we're not sure where the EC functionality is on this board.
Such accurate introspection requires discriminating correct decisions from incorrect ones,
Let's parrot the definition of EC in pretentious sounding verbiage so we'll look more important.
a capacity that varies substantially across individuals
Some of the EC chips are better than others.
We dissociated variation in introspective ability from objective performance in a simple perceptual-decision task, allowing us to determine whether this interindividual variability was associated with a distinct neural basis.
We ran the bogomips benchmark while some logic probes were placed in strategic locations.
We show that introspective ability is correlated with gray matter volume in the anterior prefrontal cortex, a region that shows marked evolutionary development in humans
We found some interesting signals on pin 3A of the 3rd chip from the CPU. By the way, did I mention that the Homo Sapiens model rocks? That's us. We RULE!
Moreover, interindividual variation in introspective ability is also correlated with white-matter microstructure connected with this area of the prefrontal cortex. Our findings point to a focal neuroanatomical substrate for introspective ability, a substrate distinct from that supporting primary perception
We're pretty sure that the ATMEL 5344-C with the glob of thermal goo performs some of this functionality on the system too. It looks like EC functionality is done on a couple of separate chips.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This is certainly going to renew interest in the Dunning-Kruger effect...
Sorry, my brain does not have that feature. It doesn't even know how much it knows.
third eye area....
"A man's gotta know his limitations."
At least a slim majority of H. sapiens seems to come up a few cards short of what's required to do this effectively; I don't think there's nearly enough "marked evolutionary development". I wish it were fun for me to watch this circus. Will it ever be better?
And it sprouted religions. If I pray for x and I get it, my god did it. Therefor he exists. If I don't get it, it was busy or had other plans.
Bert
So the left has committed itself to the godless religion of political correctness because it appeals to a lot of voters. What they miss is that political correctness is not science, it is a religion, and thus a lie. This doesn't bother them except that the opposition is a better liar. So they are like the monkey whose hand is stuck in the jar of peanuts and won't come out because he won't let go of the goodies. Both sides are simply pushing their religion on a society that doesn't want a religious state.
I had an instructor, Dr. Fine of Drafting Technology circa 1976 at the College of San Mateo, a JC. He had a saying I still remember, "Do you understand everything you know?"
-Eric
In fact they are just bluffing and don't really know a thing. I really want to cut their brain open to examine whether they have excessive level of gray matter or the opposite.