Dino J Levy and Paul W Glimcher - 2012-06

How do humans make choices between different types of rewards? Economists have long argued on theoretical grounds that humans typically make these choices as if the values of the options they consider have been mapped to a single common scale for comparison. Neuroimaging studies in humans have recently begun to suggest the existence of a small group of specific brain sites that appear to encode the subjective values of different types of rewards on a neural common scale, almost exactly as predicted by theory. We have conducted a meta analysis using data from thirteen different functional magnetic resonance imaging studies published in recent years and we show that the principle brain area associated with this common representation is a subregion of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) / orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The data available today suggest that this common valuation path is a core system that participates in day-to-day decision making suggesting both a neurobiological foundation for standard economic theory and a tool for measuring preferences neurobiologically. Perhaps even more exciting is the possibility that our emerging understanding of the neural mechanisms for valuation and choice may provide fundamental insights into pathological choice behaviors like addiction, obesity and gambling.

From the abstract: Reading words in a second language spontaneously activates native language translations in the human bilingual mind. Here, we show that the emotional valence of a word presented in English constrains unconscious access to its Chinese translation.  …  These findings show that emotion conveyed by words determines language activation in bilinguals, where potentially disturbing stimuli trigger inhibitory mechanisms that block access to the native language.

The nervous system.

(via nellsays)

Primate brains, because they provided the genome which expressed them a sufficient expected increase in fitness, and because their very design (stochastic neural nets) gave them practically limitless potential for improving their ability to increase fitness, kept evolving themselves bigger and smarter until they got to be complex enough to figure out that

primate brains, because they provided the genome which expressed them a sufficient expected increase in fitness, and because their very design (stochastic neural nets) gave them practically limitless potential for improving their ability to increase fitness, kept evolving themselves bigger and smarter until they got to be complex enough to figure out that

primate brains, because they provided the genome which expressed them a sufficient expected increase in fitness, and because their very design (stochastic neural nets) gave them practically limitless potential for improving their ability to increase fitness, kept evolving themselves bigger and smarter until they got to be complex enough to figure out that

…

elegantbuffalo:

Variability of brain size and external topography (Javier DeFelipe).

(via fullfrontaljewdity)