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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
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
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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
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"?
"In March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophising: "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 know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns", things we don't know that we know - which is precisely the Freudian unconscious. If Rumsfeld thought that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the "unknown unknowns", the threats from Saddam we did not even suspect, the Abu Ghraib scandal shows where the main dangers actually are in the "unknown knowns", the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values. To unearth these "unknown knowns" is the task of an intellectual."
-Slavoj Zizek
http://www.lacan.com/zizekempty.htm
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
EMOTIONAL detachment is part of the key. Emotions are a dangerous input to allow in the decision-making process. Sadly as a species we are wired to allow exactly that, excepting those blessed with specific neural damage or mutations.