Risk: The Neural Basis of Decision Making

Lecture presented by Professor John O’Doherty for the Darwin College Lecture Series 2010. A deeper understanding of how the brain makes decisions will not only inspire new theories of decision making, it will also contribute to the development of genuine artificial intelligence, and it will enable us to understand why some humans are better than others at making decisions, why humans with certain psychiatric and neurological disorders are less capable of doing so, and why under some circumstances humans systematically fail to make rational decisions. Most decisions made in everyday life are taken for the purposes of increasing our well-being, whether it is deciding what item to choose off a restaurant menu, or deliberating over what career path to follow. Prominent amongst these is the value or utility of each decision option, which indicates how advantageous a particular option is likely to be for our future well-being. Another relevant signal present in the brain is the riskiness attached to a particular decision option, which can influence the decision making mechanism according to ones own individual preferences (whether one is risk-seeking or risk-averse).
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