From: "Rich Gauszka" 

That's the thanks one gets for attempting to find some rationale for Bush's
irrationality


"Gary Britt"  wrote in message
news:439dc855$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> Now we know why lefties nuance things into inaction and are lousy leaders.
>
> Gary
>
> "Rich Gauszka"  wrote in message
> news:439dbb81{at}w3.nls.net...
>> 'The brain responds emotionally and often illogically when forced to make
>> decisions based on little or conflicting evidence, a new study suggests.'
>>
>>
>>
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20051212/sc_space/howambiguitymesseswithourbrai
ns
>>
>> How Ambiguity Messes with Our Brains
>> The brain responds emotionally and often illogically when forced to make
>> decisions based on little or conflicting evidence, a new study suggests.
>>
>> ambiguous decisions and are different from risky decisions.
>>
>>
>> In a risky decision, a person is uncertain about the outcome of their
> choice
>> but has an idea of the probability of success. In an ambiguous decision,
>> a
>> person is ignorant of both factors.
>>
>>
>> "Psychologists would say ambiguity is the discomfort from knowing there
>> is
>> something you don't know that you wish you did," said Colin Camerer, an
>> economist at the California Institute of Technology and the primary
>> researcher in the study.
>>
>>
>> In the experiment, test subjects made ambiguous bets while their brains
> were
>> scanned using a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI).
>>
>>
>> In one example, the subjects were given the choice between betting money
> on
>> the chances of drawing a red card from a "risky" deck
that had 20 red
> cards
>> and 20 black cards-that is, where the probability of choosing either
>> color
>> was 50:50-and making the same bet with an "ambiguous"
deck where the
>> color
>> composition of the cards was unknown.
>>
>>
>> In most cases, the subjects chose to make the risky bet. Logically,
> however,
>> both bets would have been equally good because in both cases, the chance
> of
>> pulling a red card on the first draw was 50:50.
>>
>>
>> The brain scans revealed that ambiguous wagers were often accompanied by
>> activation of the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), two areas of
> the
>> brain that are involved in the processing of emotions. In particular, the
>> amygdala has been found to be closely associated with fear.
>>
>>
>> A correlation between aversion to ambiguous decisions and activation of
>> emotional parts of the brain makes sense from an evolutionary point of
> view,
>> Camerer said. "Freezing in the face of danger is an old, emotional
> response
>> which probably was evolutionarily adaptive in our ancestral past."
>>
>>
>> In the modern human brain, this translates into a reluctance to bet on or
>> against an event if it seems at all ambiguous.
>>
>>
>> The finding could help scientists understand how humans make decisions in
>> the real world, because the choices people make are often based on very
>> limited information, Camerer told LiveScience.
>>
>>
>> "If you think about it, how often do you know the probability of
>> success?"
>> he said. "Probably, the situation we modeled with the risk game is more
> the
>> exception than the rule."
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>

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