Ideal decision-making depends on taking as much evidence as you can and practically weighing all those factors. But we\u2019re not perfect, rational beings.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaking choices is such an integral part of our lives, and we make decisions at every timescale\u2014from, \u2018What should I eat right now?\u2019 to, \u2018I want to buy a house in two years.\u2019 And all of our choices have costs,\u201d says Chandrasekaran, who\u2019s also a School of Medicine assistant professor of anatomy and neurobiology. \u201cIdeal decision-making depends on taking as much evidence as you can and practically weighing all those factors. But we\u2019re not perfect, rational beings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chandrasekaran shares these insights from his research:<\/p>\n
Chandramouli \u201cChand\u201d Chandrasekaran records brain activity to watch decisions as they form\u2014he can sometimes even predict or sway them. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n \n
- Decisions are coordinated by many different parts of the brain.<\/strong> \u201cWe don\u2019t really understand how the nuts and bolts of decision-making work. Something we\u2019re working on in my lab is understanding how different cell types in these brain areas are associated with decisions. And, secondly, the different brain areas at play are even less studied. I want to look at the whole\u2014how do multiple brain areas work on this together? With visually guided decisions there are so many brain areas involved\u2014it all starts from the retina, then eventually there\u2019s the primary visual cortex, and it goes all the way to the front of the brain, and ultimately, through the whole process, there are maybe 20 to 30 areas involved in making that decision.\u201d<\/li>\n
- Researchers can predict decisions.<\/strong> \u201cWhen you record the brain, you get access to neural activity and you can actually track when a decision is being formed. For example, the monkeys we\u2019re working with are trained to perform a decision-making task where they have to discriminate whether a cloud of dots on a screen move to the right or move to the left. We use electrodes to get neural recordings from the brain region called the dorsal premotor cortex, and then we can train a decoder that will tell us whether, at any given moment, the monkey\u2019s arm will go left or go right, effectively allowing us to predict what decision the animal will make in these tasks. I can tell you what choice the animal is going to make approximately 200 milliseconds after the stimulus comes on by using this online decoder.\u201d<\/li>\n
- Researchers can even sway those decisions.<\/strong> \u201cWe\u2019re not doing this because we want to see if we can control people\u2019s decisions\u2014this is not some mad scientist type of thing. We are trying to control the decision here in the sense that we are trying to understand what processes are involved. The way we try to understand that, with the example of the macaques and the dots, is by injecting a mild, small pulse of information in the opposite direction to see if we can actually bias the animal\u2019s decision and also the neural activity. Let\u2019s say you’re trying to make a decision about whether you want to buy something and you have some initial evidence, and then some other evidence comes in and alters your thinking about it. It\u2019s trying to understand what happens in the brain when that new evidence comes in.\u201d<\/li>\n
- Understanding how the brain makes decisions could improve treatment for people with psychiatric disorders.<\/strong> \u201cI\u2019d like to use some of these decoding approaches, like stimulating the brain in order to alter decisions, to see how I can alter this decision-making process long term and if there are implications for nervous system disorders. Currently, for all psychiatric disorders, you try to find a pill that will ameliorate that disorder. But we are in a little bit of a crisis in the mental health industry right now in the sense that we have not discovered too many new psychiatric drugs in the last 20 years, and they also often have very large side effects. But there\u2019s a new approach\u2014and it sounds like science fiction\u2014that uses stimuli and optogenetics techniques [using light to control neurons] to basically alter certain cell patterns. The idea is, if you have a mental disorder, the patterns of activity in your particular decision-making brain circuits are a little bit aberrant. If you can alter the circuit dynamics, then you might be able to have a cure for this particular disorder, or at least an amelioration. It\u2019s a little bit further away, but people are marching toward that, and I think we will be able to do it in my lifetime.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chandramouli Chandrasekaran studies neurodynamics to see what\u2019s happening in our brains as we make choices<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":57172,"template":"","department":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/57074"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/r_cas_magazine"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/57074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58073,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/57074\/revisions\/58073"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"r_cas_department","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department?post=57074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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