What happens in your brain when you make a mistake

In today’s issue of Nature magazine, Vanderbilt researchers report they’ve discovered the part of your brain that recognizes when you’ve made a mistake- the Oops center, as it’s been dubbed. This is a powerful finding because it localizes self-control in the body. It brings to mind a medieval painting that describes the moment when the soul of a baby enters its mother’s womb. Humans have struggled with the question of where our emotions, thoughts, and spirits were located within the body for centuries. Beginning to answer these questions through science is a complicated, and fascinating, undertaking.

The Vanderbilt team included Jeffrey Schall and post-doctoral fellows Viet Stuphorn and Tracy Taylor. Their group specializes in the study of how the brain controls eye movements. This study focused on the brain’s decision to move the eye or not. The experiment consisted of tasking macaque monkeys with visually tracking a spot on a computer screen. When the monkeys first began observing the screen, there was a spot in the center, which disappeared once their gaze was fixed, while another spot appeared in the periphery. If the monkey shifted its eyes to the new spot, it was awarded with juice. In some cases as the monkey was “planning” to look away, the central spot reappeared. Reward for this situation was given only if the monkey cancelled its intended eye movements and kept its eyes on the central spot.

Schall and his team were monitoring the monkeys’ brain activity during the experiment. The team kept track of neurons in the supplementary eye field, located in the frontal lobe, and the frontal eye field, which directly controls eye movements. In the supplementary eye field, three types of neurons fired in response to different circumstances. One set fired when the monkey received a reward and thus realized it had made the right decision, another set, which the team began calling the “oops” neurons, fired when the animal knew it had made a mistake, and the third set of neurons in this field responded when the brain received conflicting instructions, like in the scenario when the spot reappeared in the center just as the monkey was about to move its eyes. This indicates that the supplementary eye field is monitoring, not controlling, eye movement. Cognitive psychologists have long agreed that there must be a center that exists in the brain which controls its own activities as it makes decisions and corrects mistakes, but this is one of the first studies to identify physically where that area might exist. 

This finding has the potential to illuminate issues like schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt, Sohee Park, studies schizophrenia, and has found in her own eye-tracking experiments that 80 percent of schizophrenic patients and about half of their healthy first-degree relatives have difficulties in the executive control of eye movements. Localizing these neurological deficiencies in such patients is an important first step in effectively medicating and alleviating schizophrenic symptoms.


http://www.examiner.com/science-news-in-nashville/what-happens-your-brain-when-you-make-a-mistake