Our unconscious brain makes the best decisions possible

Our unconscious brain makes the best decisions possible

December 24th, 2008

in Medicine & Health / Research

Researchers
at the University of Rochester have shown that the human brain—once
thought to be a seriously flawed decision maker—is actually hard-wired
to allow us to make the best decisions possible with the information we
are given. The findings are published in today's issue of the journal
Neuron.

Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002
Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that argued humans rarely make
rational decisions. Since then, this has become conventional wisdom
among cognition researchers

Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky's research, Alex Pouget, associate
professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of
Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions—but
only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.

"A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision
making, but most of the decisions you make aren't based on conscious
reasoning," says Pouget. "You don't consciously decide to stop at a red
light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking
at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that
they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they
had to work with."