Understanding the impact of brain fluctuations on decision making

Project Information

NeuroFlux

Grant agreement ID: 946055

DOI

10.3030/946055

EC signature date 24 November 2020

Start date 1 February 2022

End date 31 December 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 727,50

EU contribution

€ 1 499 727,00

Coordinated by

EBERHARD KARLS UNIVERSITAET TUEBINGEN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - NeuroFlux (Understanding the impact of brain fluctuations on decision making)

Reporting period: 2024-07-01 to 2025-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Our societies are built on the premise that humans are rational and make decisions that are in line with their held beliefs. However, humans often violate this assumption and make opposing decisions, even when facing the exact same problem. In this project, we study a possible driver of these inconsistencies: endogenous brain fluctuations. We know that the brain is always active, even if we do ‘nothing’. In this project, we are tracing this endogenous brain activity across multiple brain areas and evaluate how much it influences our behaviour. Using a novel real-time neuroimaging approach, we are probing the extent to which these endogenous brain fluctuations affect behaviour across multiple tasks and cognitive domains. This will allow us to understand better a key contributor to our inconsistencies and we may find new ways on how we can tame the impact on these ebbs and flows in the brain.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

For the first reporting period, we developed and optimised new assets and methods to optimally trace and probe brain fluctuations. We used pharmacological manipulations to assess the impact of neurotransmitters on these fluctuations and validated these against more proximal recording data. Secondly, we developed novel tasks and probed these using proxy measures of ongoing brain fluctuations, such as pupillometry. Using these approaches allowed us to gain new and refine existing hypotheses and to optimally tailor the protocol for our neuroimaging studies. Lastly, we optimised the way me measure and process neuroimaging data to achieve the cleanest possible brain data. Have made good progress on all these fronts, we are now moving into neuroimaging-based assessments to probe our refined hypotheses and our advanced methods and tools.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Our project covers uncharted territory and we will be able to scope the landscape of neural fluctuations. Using this new machinery, we will be able to determine to which aspects of cognition are enslaved by the ongoing brain fluctuations and to quantify how strongly we are subjected to them. And the end of the project, we will thus have a well-evidenced assessment of a potentially major disruptor of rational decision making, which will hopefully allow us to develop novel interventions to overcome these limitations in due course.

schema of the new neuroimaging pipeline to discover the impact of brain fluctuations