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

relation to politics

[cide]

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

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.

Re:relation to politics

[sco08y]

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.

Let me see if I understand this correctly

[Chocolate Teapot]

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.

Re:Let me see if I understand this correctly

[Mikkeles]

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.

Mostly, it doesn't

[flaming error]

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.

Re:Mostly, it doesn't

[Spatial]

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

Nope. Confirmation bias is perfectly normal.

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

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