What happens in the brain when we make decisions? What happens when we realise we have made a mistake? Does this impact our future decision making, and how? Does the brain do anything to prevent us making future bad decisions? A recent study by NYU researchers sought to answer these questions.
Most of the information we receive today is visual, even more so as leaders engage with visual dashboards to make decisions. When engaged in non-visual, largely verbal discussions as part of decision making, brain activity is focused in the frontal lobes, which are associated with complex thought processes, such as planning and conscious decision-making. However, researchers measuring activity in the lower temporal region of the brain, near the temples, which is responsible for processing visual information, have found a very interesting occurrence. They have pinpointed an area in the brain that alerts us in less than a second of an impending mistake. Is this the brains alert and protection mechanism to help us not repeat a bad decision.
The finding indicates the brain reacts to mistakes before information even gets processed consciously; “early warning signal”. The impact of the signal is to effectively slow down the brain in an attempt to divert further cognitive processing.
The impact of this slowing down is a a reduction in sensitivity to sensory information and an increase in the decision bound; the partition between competing response regions. Both effects result in dynamic changes in the decision-making process. Firstly, by decreasing the sense of urgency in making the decision, and secondly, by reduction in the rate of evidence accumulation, delaying time to the point where the brain feels it has enough information to make the decision. Thus the impacts relate to both choice and response time.
Interestingly, patients with ADHD or schizophrenia do not exhibit this response. Their inability of their brain to slow down after errors has been interpreted as an impaired ability to monitor their own behaviour.
According to research results this absence of slowing may reflect fundamental changes in the underlying decision-making brain networks. Whilst we are aware that mistakes are conducive to learning; this research has opened the door to answering the unknown question of how and/or why that occurs.
If our brain alerts us in less than a second of an impending mistake so we don’t repeat it, how can we become more receptive to such warnings?
For a start we can use renewal moments to declutter our minds to provide less obstruction to the pathways these signals seek to engage. We can also become more self-aware of the state of our mind, and our body, so we sense a change.
As we become more mindful, and more knowledgeable as to the workings of the brain, we get more in touch with all of the different warning signals the body has designed to protect us. The trick is to see past the outdated warning systems – those designed by the reptilian brain to protect us from physical danger, and tune into those signals designed to protect us from cognitive and emotional harm.
Read more on this research here
Author: Gail La Grouw. Insight Mastery Program Director, and Strategic Performance Consultant for Coded Vision Ltd.
