Our brains seem to be better at predicting than we are at ourselves. A part of our thinking organ is activated when it senses that something that is going to happen will be successful , even if we have consciously chosen the opposite option.
A team from Stanford University, led by Brian Knutson, scanned the brains of 30 people as they decided whether to fund 36 projects from a crowdfunding website. Each of the participants was asked if they would like to fund the project, and their brains were scanned as they viewed the photos and descriptions of each campaign.
Half of the projects obtained sufficient funds to get ahead.
Examining the results of the brain scans, the team found that activity in one region, called the nucleus accumbens, had been different while the projects that were later chosen for funding were evaluated. In other words, the brain behaved differently when faced with projects that were unconsciously evaluated as successful.
So the team designed an algorithm to recognize these brain activity differences using scan data from 80% of the projects, and then tested the program on the remaining 20%. The algorithm was able to forecast which projects would be funded with 59.1% accuracy , more than would be expected if anticipated by mere chance. Some results that contrasted with the conscious decision issued by the participants.
As they considered each proposal, the volunteers were asked to rate how much they liked each project, and how likely they believed each of them should reach its funding goal. The most important thing about the study is that the results of the brain scans did not match the initial thinking of the volunteers, but they did anticipate the projects that were successful.
Knutson’s team was so surprised by the results that they repeated the experiment with new participants and new projects to evaluate; and got the same results.
“If we can reconstruct the decision-making process in the brain, then we will be able to identify the brain activity that represents the intention of what a person will ultimately do, ” says Knutson. “It appears that activity in the nucleus accumbens is responsible for this role.”
The difference in performance can be explained by the fact that several factors have to be weighed in making decisions. For example, the activity of your nucleus accumbens – which is associated with waiting for a reward – could increase with the prospect of buying a chocolate chip cookie; But, at the same time, other regions of your brain may think that you are going to skip the diet or that you would spend less money if you buy a snack.
The simplest explanation for Knutson’s results is that there is something about the visual presentation of the projects that were evaluated during the study that the nucleus accumbens responded strongly to, and that it is the positive or negative response that predicted their success to long term. A kind of intuition.
References:
When brain beats behavior: Neuroforecasting crowdfunding outcomes. Alexander Genevsky, Carolyn Yoon and Brian Knutson
Journal of Neuroscience (2017) 1633-16; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1633-16.2017
