Delegating the Brain’s Delegation

You’re busy. You’ve got things to do. You don’t have time for a lot of disorganization. So when you walk into the reception area of the hotel where you’re presenting a paper on neuroplasticity, you expect to see signs, pointing you to the various areas you need to go. Places like the executive center, so you can download a few slides and print them. And the coffee shop, so you grab a quick cup to fuel your talk. And of course, the restroom.

But what if the sign was garbled? What would you do? You’d ask someone-- but what if there’s no one behind the reception desk? You’d ask someone else. Another hotel patron, maybe, who, while not officially designated to give directions, might be able to point out the places you need.

A new paper in the Journal of Neuroscience suggest that the brain may be able to do the same kind of thing.

Your brain has different areas for recognizing faces and landscapes, and another part of your brain assigns attention to which ever area is required for a given task at hand. If you want to remember a face, for example, this latter area tells the landscape area to relax while telling the face area to pay attention.

Scientists showed test subjects pictures of faces overlaid on top of pictures of landscape. They had them concentrate on only one aspect of the picture to memorize it, all while the scientists used magnets to temporarily knock-out the “delegator” portion of the brain. With the delegator knocked out, subjects were still able to remember faces or landscapes as required.

They looked at brain scans while they did this, and found that a different part of the brain was acting as a temporary delegator. Note that this was not a learned response, something that had developed over time. We already know about the brain’s remarkable ability to rewire itself and compensate for damaged parts. Instead, this was an immediate taking-over of delegation activity.

That’s one take away. And it’s intriguing. The Neuroskeptic at Discover is a little more, well, skeptical. He points out that the study didn’t show for sure this reassignment, only that another part of the brain spoke up when the magnets didn’t keep delegation from happening. It might have been the case that the scientists were wrong about how much actually delegation the delegator does.

(In our hotel analogy above, that might be like the hotel patron drifting over to the sign you’re looking at, watching you read it.)

Nevertheless, it’s enough to warrant further studies which will give us even more data in a quest to understand out decision making processes.

You know, free will.