In 2016, the Human Brain Project launched a writing competition. The goal was to write a short essay on our work, aimed for a lay audience. This was the winning entry. I’m posting it here because it has never been posted anywhere. I gave a talk about the work at the HBP summit in Florence, closing a long day of talks, very late. The room was full, and it was actually a good talk, but none of my colleagues were there, so sometimes I question if it ever even happened. The prize for the contest was a t-shirt, presented to me on stage by Prof. Katrin Amunts. An awkward moment to be sure, what with my fast-expanding pregnancy belly. A note, I am not, nor have I ever been funded by the HBP. I just happened to be sitting between labs that were, in part, involved with in the project. Anyway, here is the essay, for posterity.
To Catch a Decision Point
The screen before me flickers in tune with the EPI sequence‘s frenetic, high-pitched sounds. If MRI sequences were dogs, the EPI sequence would be the endlessly yapping chihuahua. The screech covers up the sound of the machine’s steady heartbeat. I keep one eye on the brains flashing on the one screen while another regularly scans the other three monitors, making sure the human in the magnet keeps his eyes open, breathes right, and above all, performs the task. And as it often happens in the cool, clean control room, where it still smells like new car, I think, I love this; after years of neuroimaging, seeing the brains come in has yet to get old.
The peace of the routine’s hums and beeps is suddenly overshadowed by a loud alarm. With a flick of the mouse, I stop the scanner. Our subject has pressed an alarm indicating the need to speak with us. I push the button on the intercom and ask, are you all right? The answer is swift: No. I feel sick. I need to come out.
What have I done to this young man? I made him make a decision. Under uncertainty. Over and over again. It is no small wonder he got sick. Under different circumstances, the exercise would border on torture. But we in the field call it psychophysics. And some would likely emphasize the psycho part.
When I first got into neuroscience, I wanted to study altered states. A few years later, it was decision-making that captured my imagination. After all, what was life but a series of decisions? Nothing highlights this fact like your twenties. And in examining the decision process, I thought that, if I could just capture the decision-point, like one does a leprechaun, I would understand everything. Maybe find God. I might even become a God! And what better way to hunt this point down than through neuroimaging?
It took a few years before I landed my dream PhD project, studying decision-making using neuroimaging. The catch? My supervisor focused on decision-making under uncertainty. It took me a good six months of reading before it sunk in – the decision point was not what I thought it would be. It lives forever in a cloud of error points – the uncertainty. And you can make the cloud smaller, but it never truly disappears. Think you’re sure-footed? Wait a minute. Did you step in that puddle? Misinterpret a smile? Sell your stock too soon?
In my work, I try to figure out how the brain makes decisions based on the imperfect information it receives. The fact we are still kicking around after thousands of years suggests we’re pretty good at this, so there must be a dedicated brain system that processes noisy data. To investigate this process in the lab, we picked two different kinds of uncertain scenarios: a gambling game and a visual illusion task. The one that made my subject ill was the latter; a hazard of lying down watching shape-shifting cubes for half an hour.
We are now sorting, placing and ranking the data. We will glean some new information on how the brain functions –how we work. My own decision-making is no longer as fraught because I know whichever decision I make will be, in a sense, wrong – or right, and thanks to our brains, perfectly imperfect.