The "If I Only Hadda" Brain

As much as we try to live life with no regrets, no one makes it through without at least a few "wouldas," "couldas" and "shouldas." A new study released by Baylor College of Medicine researchers begins to shed light on why that is true.

When influenced by what is termed fictive learning, our decision making process gives just as much weight to what might have been as it does to what has actually happened in the recent past. The research indicates that these fictive experiences appear to have an even stronger influence when they impact the pleasure-seeking behavior of someone with an addictive personality.

Dr. P. Read Montague, Jr. is professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine and director of its Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the newly formed Computational Psychiatry Unit. According to research conducted by Dr. Montague and his colleagues, the signals that our brains receive from fictive learning are "essential in a person's ability to assess the quality of his or her actions above and beyond simple experiences” that have occurred recently. In other words, what might have been can influence our decision making as strongly as what truly did happen. This influence is especially strong in situations where a person experiences regret for not having made a different decision.

Taking advantage of refined MRI technology that can pinpoint the brain's physical changes when presented with a situation similar to one already experienced and forced to make a decision, Dr. Montague's experiment was literally able to follow the thought process and signals from the brain that helped form the choice for or against a particular decision. The research involved observing 54 different subjects and their responses to sequential gambling tasks involving reward or loss in a stock market setting, Dr. Montague stated "We used real world market data -- the crash of 1929, the bubble of the late 1990s and so on -- to probe each subject's brain response to fictive signals (what could have been) as they navigated their choices. This means we now have a kind of neural catalog of how famous stock market episodes affect signals in the average human brain." He plans to use the findings from this study to explore the balance of choices between actual and fictive outcomes.

Dr. Terry Lohrenze pointed out the importance of the work done on fictive learning . "The brain has a well-defined system for pursuing actual rewards based on actual outcomes. The system is complex, but recent research has begun to dissect them in great detail. The importance of that work is that the reward guidance signals are exactly those hijacked by drugs of abuse. Identifying real neural signals to fictive outcomes now positions us to understand how our more abstract thoughts -- the way we contextualize or frame our experience -- guide our behavior."

Dr. Lohrenze is an instructor in the neuroimaging laboratory at BCM and the report's first author.

Fictive learning seems to take on an even stronger role in the decision making process when preceded by experiences that evoke the emotion of regret for a path chosen or not taken. The fictive learning signals studied at Baylor are not emotions themselves, but are emerging as a quantifiable stepping stone our brain utilizes when choosing to follow a particular path or course of action.

ABSTRACT: Neural signature of fictive learning signals in a sequential investment task