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

thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

...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

Retraining self-assessment skills

[manaway]

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.

Re:relation to politics

[jd]

• Study 1
• Study 2
• Study 3
• Study 4
• Bonus article

Let me know when you're done with those and I'll find some more.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:What you don't know

[robot256]

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know." --Donald Rumsfeld