It’s when you encounter something that’s unexpectedly good or bad that you need to change your behavior either to keep doing the thing that’s good or avoid the thing that’s bad. There’s been a lot of debate over how these signals are represented (in the brain).
Neurosurgeons have learned that neurons in two important structures, the lateral prefrontal cortex and its neighboring subcortical structures, such as the caudate nucleus, handle both good and bad surprises.
Wael Asaad, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Brown University, and the lead author of the study published in the Journal of Neuroscience and Emad Eskandar of Massachusetts General Hospital, believe these structures may hold the key to accelerate re-learning in patients who’ve suffered brain damage. Rebuilding neural infrastructure would only be the first step.
“How do you restore the information that’s been lost, the things that you learned?” Asaad asks. “And if you could boost the reward signals at the right time, could you help them learn that particular movement more quickly?”
(Source: jneurosci.org)
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