© Andrew Brookes/GettyTell me the future, oh brain of mine
Our brains seem better at predictions than we are. Activity in a particular brain region can foresee whether projects on a crowdfunding website will succeed, even if we consciously decide otherwise. The finding suggests that neuroforecasting by scanning people's brains may provide ways to improve voting polls or even predict changes in financial markets.
To see if it is possible to predict market behaviour by sampling a small group of people, Brian Knutson at Stanford University in California and his team asked 30 people to consider whether they would fund 36 projects on the Kickstarter website. The brain scans took place as the participants were taking in the pictures and descriptions of each campaign. They were then asked to decide if they would want to fund the project.
When the Kickstarter campaigns ended a few weeks later, 18 of the projects had gained enough funding to go ahead. Examining the participants' brain scans, the team discovered that activity in a region called the nucleus accumbens had been different when they considered projects that later went on to be successful.
The team trained an algorithm to recognise these differences in brain activity, and found it was able to forecast which Kickstarter campaigns would be funded with 59.1 per cent accuracy - more than would be expected by chance.
This contrasted with what the volunteers had consciously thought. When considering each proposal, the volunteers had been asked to rate how much they liked each project, and how likely they thought each one was to reach its funding goal. These ratings predicted funding outcomes with only 52.9 per cent accuracy.
Knutson's team was so surprised by the findings that they repeated the experiment with new participants and new Kickstarter campaigns - and got the same results (Journal of Neuroscience, doi.org/cb26).
"This could be a great step forward in the field of neural prediction of population behaviour""This is highly fascinating," says Stefan Bode at the University of Melbourne in Australia, "But I feel like one is left with a rather strong paradox: how can the brain 'know' what will be successful but the person doesn't?"
This may be because you have to weigh up various factors to make decisions. For example, your nucleus accumbens activity - which is associated with expecting a reward - might increase at the prospect of buying a chocolate biscuit, but other regions of your brain may weigh in, telling you that you're supposed to be on a diet.
Even if you don't buy the biscuit, says Knutson, the nucleus accumbens might prevail in other people, or drive you to buy the biscuit at a later date. "If we can deconstruct the decision-making process in the brain, then we can identify the activity that represents the intention of what a person - on average - will eventually do," says Knutson.
"If we start to understand the origin of this phenomenon, this could be a great step forward in the field of neural prediction of population behaviour, and possibly be applicable to other areas, such as health and financial decisions," says Bode.
Taking other parts of the brain into account may further boost the predictive power of brain scans. When Knutson's team trained an algorithm on whole-brain neural activity, they were able to predict Kickstarter outcomes with 67 per cent accuracy.
Knutson says neuroforecasting might be used to improve polls predicting how people will vote, or in situations where it is not clear who a target audience is. "There are areas in which taking a representative sample doesn't always predict the outcome well - voting is a great example. Perhaps neural activity could help."
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