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How Your Brain Figures Out What It Doesn't Know

Posted by Soulskill on from the identifying-the-dunning-kruger-zone dept.

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."

16 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. relation to politics by cide · · Score: 4, Funny

    They should have correlated the study's participants with their preferred political party.

    1. Re:relation to politics by jd · · Score: 4, Informative

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

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    2. Re:relation to politics by sco08y · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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've seen some half-baked studies making similar claims that, curiously, always echo popular stereotypes. This stuff really isn't any better science than the hoary old studies measuring skull sizes of African-Americans. The biggest problem with any of them is determining what someone's orientation really is. Most people, nominally left or right, have poorly constructed views on a mess of issues, a tribal identity, and a fair amount of political paranoia. They are generally all over the map, and often don't realize their beliefs are contradictory. Honest to god partisans, who have independently developed their views and ideology, are a pretty small percentage of the population, mostly because there's so little economic benefit to doing so.

      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.

      I'm calling bullshit on this. People need to believe in the devil, and in a secular society they substitute powerful figures for it. Politicians and CEOs and such ride the wave, for the most part, and have little actual control over anything outside a narrow domain. In other words, bad things happen because people, generally, are bad, not because there is some unaccountable elite scheming behind the scenes.

      I find few powerful figures whose controversial actions aren't (eventually) explainable by a. them having superior knowledge of their domain than I have or b. them being poor leaders and surrounded by yes-men. B is a big one, never underestimate the Peter Principle.

      All political persuasions, by definition, operate on the theory that ideology comes before consequences, so all political persuasions can be considered neurological diseases.

      Nope, American conservatism operates on precisely the opposite theory. As Buckley put it, "don't immanentize the eschaton", meaning, don't try to bring about the end times or a utopia. The whole notion is that you can't have a perfect world, you don't even consider a perfect world in what you're trying to achieve. You have to work with what you've got, and you have to realize that their lives and dreams are valuable in and of themselves, and temper any changes you might try to achieve with the realization that your ends are not necessarily any greater than what they have now. The more thoroughly conservative a person is, the more consequences are everything, the ideology is nothing.

      Libertarians, Tea Party loonies and other fanatics are worsening the situation by devolution.

      Progressivism has always, in all of its incarnations, had reasons for why the right-thinking adherents to the movement were smarter, wiser, better human beings, and why people who disagreed were mentally defective, overwhelmed by hate, or even subhuman. The most depressing development lately is that as more women are taking leadership positions in the conservative movement, we now have liberals deriding them as insane or sexually damaged. Modern American progressivism started with women's suffrage, and has now come full circle to attack them in the most vicious, misogynistic ways.

  2. Oh dear.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    So my brain didn't know that my brain didn't know...that my brain didn't know... break;

  3. Let me see if I understand this correctly by Chocolate+Teapot · · Score: 4, Funny

    The ability to introspect about self-performance is key to human subjective experience, but the neuroanatomical basis of this ability is unknown. Such accurate introspection requires discriminating correct decisions from incorrect ones, a capacity that varies substantially across individuals. 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 show that introspective ability is correlated with gray matter volume in the anterior prefrontal cortex, a region that shows marked evolutionary development in humans. 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

    Nope.

    --
    Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
    1. Re:Let me see if I understand this correctly by Mikkeles · · Score: 4, Funny

      We found a distinct part of the brain that, if more developed in a particular way, lets one know that he sucks at making correct decisions. For everyone else, they don't realise that they suck.

      --
      Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
  4. Mostly, it doesn't by flaming+error · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Mostly, it doesn't by Spatial · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's odd sometimes how gut feeling and instinct end up being correct.

      Nope. Confirmation bias is perfectly normal.

    2. Re:Mostly, it doesn't by sjames · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Or they find the infinitesimal unconvincing and so when they look at their own finite knowledge divided by the infinite knowledge they don't have, they get 0.

  5. I seem to have a lesion by Duncan+J+Murray · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  6. thanks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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

  7. Bill and Ted therefore must have been geniuses... by nebaz · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  8. Retraining self-assessment skills by manaway · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:What you don't know by robot256 · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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

  10. Let's give this a shot by istartedi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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"?
  11. Re:What you don't know by Philotic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "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