Okay — I know I said I was on hiatus so I could focus on completing my thesis but this was too much to pass up.
I came across this op-ed piece in the New York Times today: Your Brains Secrete Ballot.
Here is a little snippet:
Neuroscientists have begun to tease out the brain systems that make decisions. Even when it takes no more than a second, decision-making is thought to involve two parts, gathering evidence and committing to a choice. In tasks as simple as deciding whether a shifting pattern of dots is moving to the left or to the right, brain activity in the parietal cortex rises as evidence is gathered, eventually reaching a tipping point (though it’s not yet known which brain regions drive the final choice).
Guess what. I’m one of those neuroscientists. My research uses the exact same “sifting pattern of dots is moving to the left or to the right” to determine how reward information biases what direction of motion you report seeing, and how the parietal cortex combines this information.
In fact, here is a draft of the forward to my thesis, where I also connect my research to the election:
This dissertation is about decisions. Specifically, it is about how individual factors combine to generate choice. While I write this dissertation, the people of the United States of America is deliberating a momentous decision, one widely believed to be one of the most significant in contemporary history: who will be the next President. At few other points in history have so many people been asked to integrate such a vast amount of varied information to make a single decision.
Ultimately, the decision is based upon information which predisposes or biases voter to one or the other candidate. For example, one is from the Democratic party, one is from the Republican party; one is young, one is old; one is pale-skinned, one is dark-skinned; one has a military background, one an academic background. As powerful and as useful as these biases can be when making decisions, we know that to make an optimal decision, we should not be unduly influenced by our biases. Instead, we should wisely integrate them with the current information we have about the state of this country. For example, a voter may inherently prefer an academically trained candidate but in war time might choose the militarily trained one. Another voter might be biased against the younger candidate but choose him as a symbol of change.
Our capacity to incorporate multiple sources of information permits dynamic decisions, in which prior experience is integrated with the current situation. Without this capacity, our choices would calcify with history’s deposition or slavishly meander with the moment. Understanding the biological foundation and limitation of this capacity ultimately elucidates how people resolve complex decisions into the choices, political and otherwise, which define our behavior and shape our world.
Now I’m going back to work on the rest … I’ll be back soon
