Darwin College lectures turn to risk-taking in the brain

The talk, entitled “Risk And The Brain: The neural basis of decision-making under uncertainty”, is being given by Professor John O’Doherty and will be held in the Lady Mitchell Hall on the University’s Sidgwick site on Friday (January 29th).

As usual this is a public lecture and it will begin at 5.30pm. Anyone wishing to attend is advised to arrive as early as possible as demand for places has been at record levels for the previous two lectures.

Each of this year’s eight Darwin College lectures is on the theme of risk, and the neuroscientific approach is particularly important as it promises to help us to understand how we succeed in making decisions under conditions of immense uncertainty.

Professor O’Doherty, who is Thomas Mitchell Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Trinity College, Dublin, will bring to life evidence from contemporary research about how the brain encodes basic computational signals. This evidence shows that in spite of conditions of uncertainty, the brain is able to take decisions in a near optimal manner.

He also shows that two of the most important factors in this decision-making process are the ‘riskiness’ of the decision and the ‘utility’ of the decision for increasing our well-being.

The lecture will reveal where and how such signals are encoded in the brain, and look at how they come to be learned from experience. It will also consider current research into the way such signals are compared and integrated to ultimately lead to a decision being made.

This lecture promises to be an exciting and accessible exploration of decision-making and the brain, which draws on Professor O’Doherty’s application of psychological, computational and economic theories to brain imaging data.

Professor O’Doherty was previously a research fellow at University College London and Associate Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Technology.

Darwin College has hosted The Darwin College Lecture Series, which features a series of eight public lectures, in the second term of every academic year since 1986.

Already this month, Dr Ben Goldacre has talked about how the media can distort risk information about topics like new drugs and dangerous activities and Professor David Spiegelhalter has lectured about risk and how to quantify our uncertainty. The lectures can be downloaded for free from iTunesU, with each talk appearing roughly a week after it was originally given.

For more information, visit https://www.darwin.cam.ac.uk/lecture-series/.