A Conversation with Paul Glimcher.

Abstract

Dr. Glimcher: My lab’s really focused on understanding the core underlying biological basis of how we make decisions. That’s an area that we knew very little about 20, 30 years ago.We knew a lot about Pavlovian conditioning but really didn’t think about how people make choices and what the neural architecture for that looks like. Over the course of the last 25 years, as a community we’ve made tremendous strides in making fundamental insights into that. I think at this point we can say that we understand the basic neural architecture for making decisions. We understand how parts of the frontal cortex generate values, store them, how we learn what we like and what we don’t like, and then how those values are passed to areas of the frontal and parietal cortex for decision-making, for weighing options in a very formal, mathematical sense. It’s been a really exciting field to be in for the last 25 years, because it’s really a field that was born pretty much 25, 30 years ago. At this point we really have laid the groundwork for understanding how to change policy, how to understand things like drug addiction, how to understand decisionmaking.