Research Hit: Your Brain on Flexible Decision-Making
New research shows that you brain can jump between standard neural pathways and novel pathways in the same context to change behaviour.
What do you mean change a decision in the same context?
Well there are many situations whereby we actually have multiple options and may decide to go for an alternative behaviour.
An example is that of a footballer taking a penalty. The obvious behaviour is to kick the ball into one of the corners as far away from the goalkeeper as possible. But, for example, a footballer may decide to kick the ball straight ahead pre-empting the dive the goalkeeper inevitably makes.
Isn’t this just second-guessing the goalkeeper?
Yes, but the sensory stimulus is the same but the behaviour is different so this is something fascinating for neuroscientists to study and precisely what Hao Guo et al. in Germany did in primates. There are also many areas in life and business where contexts change our decision - arguably almost everywhere.
And what did they find?
They gave these rhesus monkey a shooting task similar to the footballing situation (shooting a target using hand movement) so they could track learning and then behavioural adaption. Their brains were being scanned in various regions that are associated with planning and carrying out actions.
What they saw is that after learning the brain used default as a standard pathway and when a different decision needed to be made there was an instantaneous remapping.
Doesn’t this mean there is a standard and non-standard decision then?
Yes, standard, or learnt models of behaviour will have priority and be easier to access. But if we have a clear goal, literally in this case, then our brain can remap this in the moment to engage in alternative behaviours.
To the external world this may also appear as a novel, or creative, or ingenious solution to a situation…if it works. Precisely because brains will follow the standard pathway and be surprised at the non-standard pathway.
Isn’t his also related to predictability that you have written about before?
Yes, indeed the brain is a predictive machine. I have written about this in my online book here on Substack. See below. It could also be considered creativity which I have also just written about (will be published at the weekend).
So we remap our brains in the moment to activate new, novel, or better behaviours - nice!
Guo, H., Kuang, S. & Gail, A.
Sensorimotor environment but not task rule reconfigures population dynamics in rhesus monkey posterior parietal cortex.
Nat Commun, 2025
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56360-5