WASHINGTON — Just how confident are you that you made the right decision? New research has uncovered a part of the brain that is larger in people who seem particularly introspective.
Some people know their minds better than others, and research being reported today is a step at understanding the biology behind that important part of human consciousness.
It is work necessary for one day tackling brain injuries or diseases that rob people of key aspects of self-reflection — such as the schizophrenia patients who aren’t aware that they’re ill and thus don’t take their medication.
By learning the neurologic basis of self-awareness, “might we be able to come up with potential strategies to intervene in these cases and improve people’s introspective ability?” asks Stephen Fleming of University College London, lead author of the research published in the journal Science.
Introspection is basically thinking about your thinking, a way to judge your own thoughts and actions — and inherently difficult to study. The British research team devised a way to measure introspective ability by comparing people’s confidence in a decision they made with the accuracy of that decision.
Brain scans showed the people’s introspective ability was strongly linked to the amount of gray matter in a spot of the prefrontal cortex, right behind the eyes, the researchers reported.
