Your Brain Cells May 'Know' More Than You Let On By Your Behavior

"For the first time, we can a look at the brain activity of a rhesus monkey and infer what the animal knows," says lead investigator Thomas D. Albright, director of the Vision Center Laboratory. Neurobiologists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies carried out experiments that prove for the first time that the brain remembers, even if we don't… They report their findings in the Oct. 20th issue of Neuron

One way to study associative memory is to train rhesus monkeys to remember arbitrary pairs of symbols. Allbright: "We wondered what happened in the brain when the monkeys made the wrong choice, although they had apparently learned the right pairing of the symbols."

So, while the monkeys … made their error-prone choices, the scientists observed signals from the nerve cells in a special area of the brain called the "inferior temporal cortex" (ITC). This area is known to be critical for visual pattern recognition and for storage of this type of memory.

When Albright and his team analyzed the activity patterns of brain cells… more than 50 percent of active nerve cells belonged to a novel class of neurons, which the researchers believe represents the memory of the correct pairing of cue and associated symbol. Surprisingly, these brain cells kept firing even when the monkeys picked the wrong symbol. "In this sense, the cells 'knew' more than the monkeys let on in their behavior," says Albright.
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There is nothing new here except the demonstration that researchers can identify neuron activity that fails to determine behavioral choices. Humans are sometimes aware of such activity and describe it as “weighing the options.” If humans are unaware of the activity, psychologists might call it subliminal perception. The Thinkerer refers to developing awareness of this activity as “listening to the quiet modules of the brain.”