This proposal focuses the neural systems involved in emotions and biases and their role in human decision-making. Neural systems that subserve human biases and emotions have evolved for survival purposes. The automatic biases and emotions triggered by a given situation help the normal decision-making process by narrowing down the options for action, either by discarding those that are dangerous or endorsing those that are advantageous. Biases and emotions serve an adaptive role speeding up the decision-making process. However, there are circumstances in which a naturally occurring bias or emotional response must be inhibited, so that a deliberate and potentially wiser decision can be made. Although recent research in neuroscience and psychology has highlighted the positive roles played by biases and emotions in decision-making, there are many instances where there is a negative side to biases and emotions in decision-making. Depending on the circumstances, biases, moods, and emotions can play useful as well as disruptive roles in the process of making advantageous decisions. Thus it is not a simple issue of trusting biases and emotions as the necessary arbiter of good and bad decisions. It is a matter of discovering the circumstances in which biases and emotions can be useful or disruptive, and using the reasoned coupling of circumstances and biases and emotions as a guide to human behavior.
This project will: (1) Explore some of the circumstances in which biases and emotions influence decisions one way or another, and examine whether there are some personality and/or cognitive characteristics that render an individual more or less susceptible to a specific form of bias. (2) Examine the functional organization of the CEO of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, and understand how this structure manages complex information, assign values to information, and ultimately execute decisions. (3) Test a model of human intelligence that is based on how the CEO of the brain is functionally organized. The idea is that one individual will assume the function of one group of cells or sub-region of the prefrontal cortex, instead of the whole region. A group of individuals, with each one processing a separate stream of information in parallel, will then merge together, thus simulating the function of the prefrontal cortex of a human brain.
