Imagine you are playing poker. The cards were dealt, your opponent changed one and is now ready to play; you're ready for battle too. You peer into his face, you see that for visual convenience he rearranged several cards in his set, finally opened his mouth and is going to make a bet. The simplest prediction is the very fact that he is about to call a bet. After all, he will not sit like this for a hundred years, so he has already opened his mouth. It's harder to guess what he'll say. And it's even more difficult to know if he's bluffing.
Different people guess better or worse; Scientists have long understood that some complex mechanism is constantly working in the brain for this task. Professor Jeff Sachs from the University of Washington (St. Louis, USA) conducted a study on the brain mechanisms of working with the future and found a specific brain center responsible for this ability. It turned out that the whole point is in the ability to notice the boundaries between micro-events.
The researchers showed the volunteers a video of everyday activities: washing a car or assembling a Lego model. Then the video was paused, and the volunteers were asked the question: what will happen next?
Moreover, the pause was created in two ways: either in the middle of a routine action, or 2.5 seconds before the action was completed. If a pause occurred in the middle of an action, nothing special happened in the brain; but if at the turn, then the centers located in the midbrain, generally referred to the so-called substantia nigra (the name was invented by early anatomists who noticed that this area is darker due to accumulations of melatonin), lit up on the tomograph screen.
“It is known that these centers have two roles. The first is long-term memory. This is natural: faced with an unexpected event - for example, bumping my forehead into an unexpectedly low hanging kitchen lamp - I must remember where it hangs so that it does not happen again. The second role is the operational restructuring of the brain, activation of attention, perception. And this role is especially interesting,”explains the professor.
Sachs cites a philosophical parallel: "A hundred years ago, psychologist William James wrote:" Consciousness is a continuous stream […] in which the thought of one object is separated from the thought of another object no more than the knees of bamboo are separated from each other by a seam. " … These seams are the most important for successful predictions."
Let's explain with the example of poker. If I am an inexperienced player, then for me all the fuss and gestures of my partner before the bet is announced is a single action, a smooth bamboo knee. The seam comes only at the end, when the player is about to say something. Before that, my mind is dealing with the hypothesis "now he will tinker, grunt and name the rate." At the onset of the seam, the black substance is triggered and requires consciousness to update the hypothesis: what will happen next?
The reality of the more experienced player consists of many more smooth knees and seams: substantia nigra is triggered every second. This is a deeply subconscious process, but the black substance constantly tugs at the cortex (consciousness) and asks if it's time to rebuild the hypothesis. The enemy rearranged several cards in the fan - seam! - closed his eyes - seam! - changed the pose - seam!
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Each of us has our own pattern of smooth bamboo knees and seams; we update hypotheses about the future with different frequencies and based on different information. As a result, an experienced player will live up to the same milestone - a bet announcement - with a completely different hypothesis about further events compared to an inexperienced one.
Sachs explains: “Success depends on two factors: attention and experience. But if the substance did not work, then the required analysis will not be carried out at all, subjectively it will seem to us that nothing important is happening, there is nothing to guess about. Consciousness will not see that a period of uncertainty begins and that the hypotheses need to be updated."
Hence - the plan for the next work: “There are two ways to develop your ability to predict: gaining experience and training observation. We are working on a new series of experiments where we are training a group of volunteers to see how this affects the performance of their substantia nigra,”said Jeff Sachs.