The visual cortex, a region of the brain that receives and processes the information we pick up through our eyes, could also play a key role in our ability to anticipate events . At least, that’s what a team of researchers from the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior Research at Radboud University in the Netherlands indicates.
This ability is what, for example, allows us to predict the path that an approaching car will follow while we wait on the sidewalk, which leads us to decide whether or not to cross to the other side of the street. In this way, the aforementioned cerebral cortex would intervene both in our ability to perceive the vehicle and in predicting where it would circulate in the immediate future.
In a study published in Nature Communications , these neuroscientists, coordinated by Matthias Ekman, describe an experiment with which they tried to elucidate why this occurs. Thus, they showed a group of volunteers a white dot that moved rapidly from one corner of a screen to another. At the same time, they studied its neural activity and blood flow in various areas of the brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging . After being shown the entire sequence several times, Ekman and his colleagues decided that only one of the dots would appear on the screen. In this way, they were able to verify that the brain pattern that was formed in the visual cortex was not limited to the appearance of just one, but to the entire route that it would hypothetically make on the screen. That is, their brains could accurately anticipate movements . “Our results prove that we form expectations about what is going to happen, and that this region of the brain contributes to completing a sequence from a partial contribution,” says Ekman.
For this expert, this ability to anticipate the future is also an automatic process, which happens even if we focus our attention on another matter. “Our visual cortex constantly anticipates events that occur around us, whether it is the movement of the blades of a windmill or if we try to catch a ball that is heading towards us,” he says. These scientists also investigate what other brain regions collaborate for this task. “We suspect that the hippocampus, an area related to memory formation, is also involved,” says Ekman.
