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."

Comments

Re:relation to politics

[jd]

They've already done brain-scans on people with political affinities. Those who are right-wing show under-developed regions dealing with emotion, those on the left-wing show similar defects in other areas of the brain. I'd like to say politicians have no brain, but politicians fit into the same category as CEOs and CEOs are well-established as schizophrenic sociopaths and politicians will likely therefore exhibit brain damage accordingly. All political persuasions, by definition, operate on the theory that ideology comes before consequences, so all political persuasions can be considered neurological diseases.

This is not to say all politics is that way - it is entirely possible for a person to borrow from other ideologies to evolve their own heterogeneous philosophy. The end result may not be "correct" in any practical sense in any specific case, but it is mentally the sounder approach and shows a good balance between rationality and emotions. The "ideal" political process would be one of continuous evolution, with a multiplicity of variation, where both mentally unhealthy and socially unhealthy strains died off, and new ideas were both encouraged and continuously integrated in efforts to exploit the inherent health of heterogeneous systems versus homogeneous systems.

The reality is that no country in the world practices evolutionary politics - proportional representation is the closest anyone has got but hasn't yet successfully reduced power-play politics. Libertarians, Tea Party loonies and other fanatics are worsening the situation by devolution. Individualism ceased to be a significant force in the affairs of what would later become humans long before primates ever evolved. Even insects have long realized that that path is a dead end.