Watching decision making in the brain

IMAGE: Stanford neuroscientists and engineers used neural implants to track decision making in the brain, in real time. In the course of deciding whether to keep reading this article, you may change your mind several times. While your final choice will be obvious to an observer - you'll continue to scroll and read, or you'll click on another article - any internal deliberations you had along the way will most likely be inscrutable to anyone but you. That clandestine hesitation is the focus of research, published Jan. 20 in Nature, by Stanford University researchers who study how cognitive deliberations are reflected in neural activity. These scientists and engineers developed a system that read and decoded the activity of monkeys' brain cells while the animals were asked to identify whether an animation of moving dots was shifting slightly left or right.