Do you still have this confidence region in your brain post-stroke? If not, what the hell is your doctor doing to recover it? You are going to need massive amounts of confidence that you will recover even though your doctor knows nothing about how to get you back to 100% recovery. I must still have it because even though 8 years later I still have quite a few deficits I know I will eventually recover. As compared to my doctor who told me nothing about my recovery prospects. He must have been confident that he was right. In my opinion he knew nothing and I'm confident in that opinion. I'm confident in my confidence, must be my arrogance showing.
Neural Basis of Confidence Uncovered in Mice
Life is a series of decisions, ranging from the mundane to the
monumental. And each decision is a gamble, carrying with it the chance
to second-guess. Did I make the right turn at that light? Did I choose
the right college? Was this the right job for me?
Our desire to persist along a chosen path is almost entirely
determined by our confidence in the decision: when you are confident
that your choice is correct, you are willing to stick it out for a lot
longer.
How do we know when a rat is exhibiting confidence? The researchers
devised a method to study decision making in these animals. The rats
were offered an odor that they were trained to associate with one of two
doors. When they chose the correct door, they were rewarded. This part
was easy for the animals: their selections were almost always correct.
Things got trickier when Kepecs and his team offered a mixture of the
two scents, with one dominating over the other by only a very small
percentage. The rats now needed to choose the door representing the
dominant odor in order to get their reward– a choice that reflects their
best guess.
In work published today in Neuron, the team describes how
confidence can be measured simply by challenging a rat to wait for the
reward to be revealed behind the door. The time they are willing wait
serves as a measure of the confidence in their original decision. “We
found that the rats are willing to ‘gamble’ with their time,” Kepecs
explains, sometimes waiting as much as 15 seconds, which is an eternity
for these animals. “This is something that we can measure and create
mathematical models to explain,” said Kepecs. “The time rats are willing
to wait predicts the likelihood of correct decisions and provides an
objective measure to track the feeling of confidence.”
The researchers hypothesized that a distinct region of the brain
might control confidence. Previous work has suggested that the
orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a part of the brain involved in making
predictions, might have a role in decision confidence. Kepecs and his
team specifically shut off neurons in the OFC, inactivating it, and
found that rats no longer exhibited appropriate levels of confidence in
their decisions.
“With an inactive OFC, the rats retained the ability to make
decisions– their accuracy did not change,” said Kepecs. “And they spent
the same amount of time waiting for a reward on average. The only
difference is that animals’ willingness to wait for a reward was no
longer guided by confidence. They would often wait a long time even when
they were wrong.”
The discovery offers a rare glimpse into the neuronal basis of a
higher-level cognitive process, and is likely to have implications in
human decision-making as well. As Kepecs describes, “we now know that
the OFC is critical for making on-the-fly predictions in rats. The human
OFC is just a more sophisticated version of the rodent counterpart.”
The team is expanding their research to explore how the elusive feelings
of confidence are based on objective predictions that influence human
decisions as well.
The study appeared online in Neuron.
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