If a friend or relative won $100 and then offered you a few dollars, would you accept this windfall? The logical answer would seem to be, sure, why not? “But human decision making does not always appear rational,” said Read Montague, professor of physics at Virginia Tech and director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at […]
The powers that be in Las Vegas figured out something long before neuroscientists at two Duke University medical schools confirmed their ideas this week: Trying to make decisions while sleep-deprived can lead to a case of optimism. The scientists showed using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that a night of sleep deprivation leads to […]
While a much hailed communication intervention works for families making decisions for chronically-ill loved ones in medical intensive care units (ICU), Case Western Reserve University researchers found the intervention was less effective for patients on surgical and neurological ICUs.
In every waking minute, we have to make decisions – sometimes within a split second. Neuroscientists at the Bernstein Center Freiburg have now discovered a possible explanation how the brain chooses between alternative options. The key lies in extremely fast changes in the communication between single nerve cells.
We know that casting a ballot in the voting booth involves politics, values and personalities. But before you ever push the button for your candidate, your brain has already carried out an election of its own to make that action possible. New research from Vanderbilt University reveals that our brain accumulates evidence when faced with […]
Psychologists have known for a long time that after you make a choice, you adjust your opinion to think better of the thing you chose. Now a new study has found that this is true even if you do not know the options that you are choosing between. The study is published in Psychological Science, […]
Many people believe that getting older means losing a mental edge, leading to poor decision-making. But a new study from North Carolina State University shows that when it comes to making intuitive decisions – using your “gut instincts” – older adults fare as well as their juniors. The researchers tested groups of young adults (aged […]
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