Weekly Roundup: Biased Brains Make Fast Decisions, How Your Brain Suppresses Alternatives, the Brain Chemical that Helps you Choose Exercise over Milkshake, and How Your Morals Change with the Seasons

I’ll start off this week with some research that caught my attention on decision making. I am a slow decision maker and can be very indecisive — apparently this is good thing!

Fast Decisions Reflect a Biased Brain

My mother used to say it was because I was born a Libra — the scales represent indecision she thought. Well, astrology is junk and now some research may point to another reason for my indecisiveness and longer decision making. Lack of bias.

Mathematician Samantha Linn et al. conducted research into purely mathematical models of decision making using something known as evidence accumulation models which are designed to assess how agents accumulate and integrate information in order to make a decision.

This is useful for everyday life, in business, but also can explain some facets of extremism.

And what did they find?

Well as I’ve already alluded to:

“…results revealed that, in groups of agents whose only differences are in their…