Periodic Reporting for period 3 - NeuroFlux (Understanding the impact of brain fluctuations on decision making)
Reporting period: 2024-07-01 to 2025-12-31
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.
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.
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.