There at this morning's meeting was a large box of donuts which I had absolutely no intention of eating. None. Until I changed my mind.
What happened this morning was probably a little more complex than the simple changes of mind that Stanford Neurosciences Institute director William Newsome studies, what with the delicious smell of chocolate and a quick realization that perhaps a lunchtime run could be squeezed into my day.
Newsome has focused on recording the activity of individual neurons in animals making simple decisions, like indicating which way a dot is moving on a screen. He and his team then statistically analyze the results of many such recordings of individual neurons. These studies have gone a long way toward revealing the activity of neurons in different parts of the brain but can miss some of the fine scale dynamics that take place during the decision-making process. Recently, new probes have been developed that allow scientists to record the activity of many neurons at the same time.
Using such a probe, Newsome and his team recorded groups of neurons in animals making simple decisions, and could track in real time the patterns of how the neurons fired as the animals made a decision and changed their minds. They published their results in Current Biology. A press release from New York University quotes co-first author on the paper Roozbeh Kiani (a former postdoctoral scholar in Newsome's lab):
“Looking at one neuron at a time is ‘noisy’: results vary from trial to trial so you cannot get a clear picture of this complex activity. By recording multiple neurons at the same time, you can take out this noise and get a more robust picture of the underlying dynamics.”
The team was able to watch the neurons firing in real time, and detect a pattern indicating which decision the animal was going to make. They could also tell when the animal changed its mind, for example as a result of a stronger signal on the screen or to more time to make a decision. What I found interesting is that in most cases when the animals changed their minds it was to correct their initial decision.
What does all this suggest about my donut splurge? Maybe that given enough time I was able to correct my initial decision of self-control to the right one - of deliciousness.