Overview
In this interview, Professor Tim Hanks discusses topics related to neuroscience, decision making, philosophy, and science as a career. Hanks explores how ideas from computational neuroscience have helped him set his own research agenda and navigate everyday situations. He discusses the intertwining of brain decision-making with free will, conscious awareness, and mental health, recommending an integrative approach drawing on multiple types of experiments and model systems.
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Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- Hanks argues free will is better approached as "To what extent do we have free will?", answerable by describing the neural mechanisms underlying decisions.
- Hanks recounts that speed-accuracy control in his work operated via added internal drive (an "urgency" signal) rather than a lower neural threshold.
- Hanks suggests simultaneous evaluation of evidence over multiple timescales could be supported by cascade models with progressively longer timescales, noting this is not yet shown.
- Hanks proposes that a reduced decision bound could explain both impulsivity and distractibility in ADHD, with corticostriatal circuits implicated.
- Hanks takes an inclusive view of decision making, holding that even a single neuron can make a decision, though with less complexity than a network.
Methods
- Q&A interview with neuroscientist Timothy Hanks — Mikhailova and Friedman pose long-form questions to Hanks on neuroscience, decision making, philosophy, and science careers, published in ALIUS Bulletin.
- Questions anchored in Hanks's published studies — Interviewers frame questions around specific prior work, such as his macaque speed-accuracy study and an auditory-click change detection task.
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Document downloads
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- 2020_NeuroscienceDecision.pdf PDF · 0.31 MiB · extracted-text source
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