Urgent Choices

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How is your brain wired to process decisions? You can make important decisions, like whether to listen to SciWorks Radio, which require time to think. But whether or not you realize it, you make split-second decisions more than a hundred thousand times every day. 

I spoke with Dr. Emilio Salinas, Associate Professor, Neurobiology & Anatomy at the Wake Forest School of Medicine, here in Winston-Salem, who is working to understand how the brain makes these quick decisions.

Instead of studying very complex choices that develop over months or weeks or days, we study very quick choices that happen very often. So in particular we study eye movements which happen about three or four times every second, and that comes to about ten thousand choices per hour. So deciding where to look next is by far the most common decision we ever make. We look at very simple discrimination, so a triangle versus a square, or a green dot versus a red dot. We can measure very accurately how the visual system analyzes these simple stimuli. The choices that we study in the laboratory, we call them urgent choices because they have to decide where to look, but this has to be really very fast. So it's based on visual information that you just have to glance and then you have to make your choice.

The decision-making process is a system unto itself, which can include all of your senses. Dr. Salinas studies eye movements, but there are also scientists dedicated to understanding other individual aspects.

In real life, most decisions are based not on one, but on multiple inputs. There's a whole field called multisensory integration, that studies exactly how sounds and vision are put together. There are lots of different circuits in the brain that are specialized for putting together different types of modalities. The hope is that we can extract fundamental principles that are common to a variety of tasks and a variety of circuits. If we can draw circuit diagrams that are generic, then our chances of understanding how our brain works and of fixing things that go wrong are much higher than if these individual circuits are highly specialized for whatever it is they are doing. Let's say processing visual images versus processing sound.

So the key is to decode, when making an urgent choice, whether the brain processes sight and sound with the same circuitry, a combination of two circuits, or completely independent of one another. But why does this matter?

The reason why this matters is because there are lots of situations that are problematic that involve choices. Why do we sometimes take unnecessary risks? Or impulsivity; why is it that sometimes we do things right away, and in retrospect we really knew that it was a bad idea? Eventually we want these findings to be translated into effective strategies for counteracting these kinds of bad decision-making.

This kind of basic research may or may not help to solve these decision-making problems. Even if it falls completely flat in that regard, the results will have the potential to serve as a piece to a larger puzzle.

Basic research addresses fundamental questions. In trying to answer these questions it is often the case that these enormous insights come up that we would have otherwise never seen. It's just like your investment portfolio. You really want to make money, that's your goal, but you have no idea which one of the thousands of companies out there is going to be the next Google. So what do you do? Well, you diversify. And that's exactly the same kind of strategy that works in science. You look at a variety of fundamental questions, you diversify. You know that if you do that, a few of those in ten years will have groundbreaking insights. Me personally, I have a lot of fun doing this. I am aiming for solving a big problem, but I am very happy with solving little problems that will contribute to that. What we do every day in the laboratory is chipping away at difficult problems that we know we can solve. So we know eventually the weight of the work gets you to a breakthrough. But you never know when that is going to come up.

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