Mental Tug of War Is Built Into Your Brain

Image SourceConflict and competition is just the way the brain works. One part of your brain wants to do one thing, but another part wants to stop it, or to do something else instead. This is the war of the whorls, the way evolution built animal consciousness. The research described in the article quoted below involves a mental tug of war between two parts of the pre-frontal cortex. But this is a game the entire brain has to play.

Those who made good decisions and employed self-control exhibited more activity in the DLPFC region of the brain, where as the amount of activity in the vmPFC was similar in both groups. According to the lead author of the paper Todd Hare, "the vmPFC works during every decision. The DLPFC, on the other hand, is more active when you're employing self-control."

Based on their findings, the authors speculate on the evolution of our brains and the nature of self-control. They argue that the vmPFC originally evolved to predict or forecast the "short-term value of stimuli," and that humans gained the ability to examine the long-term considerations as structures such as the DLPFC evolved to modulate the short-term desire signal. While the experiments were limited to diet choices, the authors state that understanding the origins of self-control can have implications for areas as diverse as addiction science, economic policy, and even into determining whether someone is in full command of their decision-making facilities under the eyes of the law.

Science, 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1168450

_ArsTechnica

The simultaneous activation of tens of thousands of massively interconnected cortical columns and other brain centers leads to a somewhat limited number of "attractor states" of global brain activation. These states may last for an extremely brief instant before transitioning into other attractor states of global activation.

It happens much too quickly for the conscious mind to follow. You might say that the conscious mind is something of a dunce, in terms of what the brain itself is capable of. The conscious mind has to "freeze frame" simplified brain states via the rather clumsy imaging methods that humans have devised so far. If humans could devise an imaging system based upon the multi-level massive parallelism of the brain itself, progress in neuroscience would move a lot more quickly.