A fascinating article about research being done by some folks at MIT. Apparently we learn better from success than failure.
When I asked Clif Saper, our Chief of Neurology to comment, he said the following. I think the last point has something to do with how I am supposed to treat Chiefs of Service!
The thing that is most salient in this work is the role of reward. Emilio Bizzi at MIT began studying prefrontal neurons and their role in directing eye movements in the 1960’s, and found that they had no real relationship to the eye movements when the monkeys randomly scanned the room. But later it was found that if you reward the monkeys for looking in a certain direction, they respond briskly. Primate prefrontal cortex is a machine for shaping behavior based on reward. There is a lesson in there...
