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A neural correlate of certainty
Adam Kepecs' Eppendorf essay, hosted at science's website (but not printed in the magazine), is about some neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex of rats that appear to represent uncertainty in an odor-recognition task by firing more often, at a rate roughly linearly proportional to the error rate.
The involvement of OFC in decision-making isn't new, but the graphs are nice and quantitative.
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Comments (2)
Next time you talk to a creationist, try waving a magnet over their OFC while they're thinking. I tried to find out how strong a magnet you'd need and how fast you have to wave it back and forth from this famous study; but shockingly (I don't know why I'm still shocked by these things), the study nowhere indicates how strong a magnetic field they used, gives conflicting information on the frequency of the field change, and probably gives the wrong information anyway, since I don't believe either 1Hz or 10Hz is fast enough to have an effect.
Liane Young confirmed by email that 1Hz (and/or 10Hz) is the pulse frequency, not the (more relevant) magnetic field oscillation frequency.