Tuesday 01 September 2015

Why you should trust your instincts

The old adage that you should always trust your instincts is supported for the first time by a scientific study.

For a century, there has been no convincing evidence that subliminal messages can influence people's decisions.

But there has been a more subtle phenomenon, billed as the foundation of intuition, where a seasoned poker player may play more successfully because they can pick up subtle signals in the body language of their opponents - without consciously realising it - to work out if they are bluffing..

Now, a new study published in the journal Neuron uses a blend of techniques, including brain scanning, to provide the first hard evidence that this so called "instrumental learning" can occur, showing we should trust our instincts.

In popular books such as Blink, it has been claimed that this form of intuition can result in a better decision than conscious reasoning, says lead author Dr Mathias Pessiglione from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at the University College London.

To investigate this phenomenon, Dr Pessiglione and colleagues masked visual cues with scrambled drawings such that they were hard to tell apart.

In the next set of experiments, the subliminals cues were now paired with rewards, so that one cue would pay better than another in a consistent way defined by a computer program.

The volunteers were still not able to discern a difference, but their guesses were better than chance when it came to spotting the highest reward.

Brain scans revealed a structure called the ventral striatum responded to subliminal cues "in a manner that closely approximates our computational algorithm, expressing reward expected values," says Dr Pessiglione.

"We conclude that, even without conscious processing of contextual cues, our brain can learn their reward value and use them to provide a bias on decision making."

Instrumental learning involves linking a cue, an action and the outcome (in terms of reward or punishment).

The law of effect says that if an action (like pressing a lever) performed in a given context (like a cage) is rewarded (for instance with food pellets) then it will be more likely to be executed in future occurrence of the same context (that is the next time you put the rat in the same cage with the same lever).

"This kind of learning had been suggested to be subconscious a century ago, on the grounds that it was observed in some species like rats that were supposed to be deprived of conscious awareness," says Dr Pessiglione.

"We just proved this in humans, and identified the underlying neuronal circuit."

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