How Your Brain Figures Out What It Doesn't Know

hex0D passes along an article at NPR about a study that examined the biology behind the self-assessment of knowledge. Quoting: "We isolated a region of the prefrontal cortex, which is right at the front of the brain and is thought to be involved in high-level thought, conscious planning, monitoring of our ongoing brain activity,' Fleming says. In people who were good at assessing their own level of certainty, that region had more gray matter and more connections to other parts of the brain, according to the study Fleming and his colleagues published in the journal Science."

relation to politics

[cide]

They should have correlated the study's participants with their preferred political party.

Oh dear..

[Anonymous Coward]

So my brain didn't know that my brain didn't know...that my brain didn't know... break;

Let me see if I understand this correctly

[Chocolate Teapot]

The ability to introspect about self-performance is key to human subjective experience, but the neuroanatomical basis of this ability is unknown. Such accurate introspection requires discriminating correct decisions from incorrect ones, a capacity that varies substantially across individuals. We dissociated variation in introspective ability from objective performance in a simple perceptual-decision task, allowing us to determine whether this interindividual variability was associated with a distinct neural basis. We show that introspective ability is correlated with gray matter volume in the anterior prefrontal cortex, a region that shows marked evolutionary development in humans. Moreover, interindividual variation in introspective ability is also correlated with white-matter microstructure connected with this area of the prefrontal cortex. Our findings point to a focal neuroanatomical substrate for introspective ability, a substrate distinct from that supporting primary perception

Nope.

So they're saying ...

[PPH]

.... there's an anatomical explanation for who is ignorant. If it takes an autopsy to arrive at the proper conclusion, I'm fine with that. Shoot them all and let the coroner sort them out.

I seem to have a lesion

[Duncan J Murray]

Well, at 3 weeks prior to the most important professional exam of my career, I appear to be posting on Slashdot.

I hereby donate my brain to medical science so that the lesion present in my prefrontal cortex can help pinpoint this area more precisely.

Re:Let me see if I understand this correctly

[Mikkeles]

We found a distinct part of the brain that, if more developed in a particular way, lets one know that he sucks at making correct decisions. For everyone else, they don't realise that they suck.

Re:Mostly, it doesn't

[Spatial]

I'm quite certain that you're wrong!

Bill and Ted therefore must have been geniuses...

[nebaz]

Bill: "So-crates . . . the only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing."
Ted: "That's US, dude!"
Bill: "Oh, yeah!"