Friday, December 11, 2009

Neuroscience of keeping promises

This is an age of capturing all possible "neural representations". A simple analogy for the current stage of neuroscience with respect to its immense future potential, might be the early days in the human history during the scripting of the first alphabets, which was a prelude to the Shakespearean classics and eventually to the dawn of Google. It's good to tabulate all these representations since its too early to decipher the consequences, potential, possible remedies and the unwarranted malevolence. Here's the neural representations of promises kept and broken:

"The team set up a game of trust between an investor and a trustee. In the game, an investor is given real money, which they can choose to invest in a trustee. Giving the money to the trustee increases the amount of money fivefold, but the investor runs the risk that the trustee might not share the winnings but keep all the money for themselves.

Baumgartner's team ran the game twice. The first time, investors simply had to guess whether trustees would share the winnings and then made their decision accordingly. The second, trustees could promise to share the winnings with the investor, if they wanted – although the promise was non-binding.
Almost all the trustees promised to always share their winnings, thereby securing investment. While some of them remained true to their word, others consistently broke their promise, keeping the hoard for themselves.
The trustees had their brains scanned using fMRI during both runs; they spoke to the investor from inside the scanner via an intercom.
The fMRI data revealed that certain brain areas became more active when trustees were breaking a promise. These regions – the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (here), anterior cingulate cortex (here) and amygdala – are known to be involved in emotion. They could reveal an emotional conflict in a person who knows they are doing something wrong, or feels guilty, says Baumgartner.
Most interestingly, similar areas were active in people who were making promises that they later broke, but not in people making promises that they ended up honouring. This suggests that the former group fully intended to cheat the investor out of their money with a phoney promise, says Baumgartner.

He admits, however, that a scan probably wouldn't be able to predict whether someone who doesn't intend to break a promise will end up doing so. It might also fail to pick up the false promises made by people who don't feel any emotional conflict when they do so, such as pathological liars.
"We might still see some conflict, though," says Baumgartner. "Those areas of the brain might register a conflict between saying you will do something and knowing that you won't, although this area needs more research."


Again, its too early to conclude anything and neuroscientists are very cautious on any mad rush to adapt and become overdependent on this nascent technology. They say in history, timing is everything. We are lucky to have such humane, neuroscientist at the right time when neuroscience is galloping at a fastest pace ever. But some of them even flay the "minority report" theory.

"FMRI can be very useful for other investigative and forensic purposes, but I do not think that it will ever be a safe method to use for prediction of behaviour. Minority Report is science fiction and so it will remain.”

Well, I disagree, my earlier analogy of alphabets and neural representations might be proven right sometime in future and its not question "if" but its a question of "when". So from my perspective, the big question is how long is that future is from today?

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