First Mammalian Brain-Extensive Map Might Reveal How Intuition and Decision-Making Works

For centuries, philosophers have requested: the place, within the thoughts, does a choice start? Is there a second we are able to level to and say—there, that’s when the thoughts… made up its thoughts?

Neuroscience has lengthy tried to reply this query by peering into tiny corners of the mind, finding out a handful of neurons at a time. But now, in an unprecedented act of scientific coordination, researchers have created the primary full map of brain-wide exercise throughout decision-making—one which captures almost all the theater of thought.

The result’s a stunning snapshot of the mind in movement. “The decision-making activity, and particularly reward, lit up the brain like a Christmas tree,” stated Alexandre Pouget, a computational neuroscientist on the University of Geneva and co-founder of the International Brain Laboratory (IBL).

A Steering Wheel, a Mouse, and a Global Effort

The breakthrough got here from a lab collective. The International Brain Laboratory, or IBL, introduced collectively 22 labs throughout Europe and the U.S. Each lab skilled mice to play a deceptively easy online game: transfer a striped circle towards the middle of a display utilizing a tiny LEGO steering wheel. The faster and extra correct the transfer, the sweeter the sip of sugar water they’d earn.

But right here’s the twist. Sometimes the goal on the display was so faint it was barely seen. To succeed, the mice needed to fall again on expertise—on prior expectations about the place the goal would seem.

That made the duty excellent for finding out one of many mind’s most elusive expertise: how we use each present sensory data and previous expertise to make selections.

And whereas every lab targeted on totally different mind areas, all of them adopted the identical rigorous protocols. The result’s a dataset of staggering scope: greater than 620,000 neurons recorded from 139 mice throughout 279 mind areas.

“This had never been done before,” stated Alejandro Pan Vazquez, a analysis scholar at Princeton University.

The Brain is a Democracy, Not a Dictatorship

What the scientists discovered upended conventional views of how selections are made.

For a long time, researchers believed that particular mind areas acted as resolution hubs. But the brand new knowledge confirmed one thing totally different. “If there’s one thing we’ve discovered from this work,” Pouget informed New Scientist, “it’s that no one brain area ‘decides’. Decision making involves tens of areas that decide through a kind of consensus.”

This distributed course of begins earlier than the choice is even made. Neural indicators related to upcoming decisions start constructing earlier than any motion happens. In some circumstances, these indicators have been detectable even earlier than the stimulus appeared on display.

And these weren’t simply discovered within the frontal cortex or parietal lobe—the same old suspects in cognition. The indicators rippled throughout areas concerned in motion, imaginative and prescient, reward, and even the hindbrain and cerebellum.

“One of the important conclusions of this work is that decision-making is indeed very broadly distributed throughout the brain, including in regions that we formerly thought were not involved,” stated Ilana Witten, a neuroscientist at Princeton.

That contains deep brainstem areas just like the gigantocellular reticular nucleus, which confirmed particularly sturdy indicators tied to the mice’s decisions.

What About Intuition?

The second of two Nature papers launched by the IBL targeted on expectation, or the mind’s capability to guess what is going to occur subsequent based mostly on previous experiences. Here too, the indicators have been all over the place.

Some appeared shockingly early within the course of, whilst sensory data was leaving the attention and touring to the thalamus. That’s earlier than any aware consciousness of the stimulus.

“This might correspond with what we perceive as intuition,” stated Pouget. The mind, on this view, is consistently predicting. In different phrases, the mind is just not passively receiving data however actively shaping what we understand based mostly on what it expects to seek out.

“This suggests that it is our own behavior and subjective experience that shapes what we expect to see next, rather than the true, objective state of the world,” added Laurence Hunt, a neuroscientist on the University of Oxford, as per New Scientist.

A Model for Big Neuroscience

The science alone would have made headlines. But maybe simply as hanging is the way in which it was finished.

In a subject notorious for small pattern sizes and fragmented findings, IBL got down to present what a coordinated, reproducible neuroscience experiment may seem like. Labs used the identical habits protocols, shared the identical evaluation pipelines, and even despatched mind samples to a centralized histology lab at University College London.

“The brain is the most complex structure we know of in the universe,” stated Tom Mrsic-Flogel, director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre in London. “Understanding how it drives behavior requires international collaboration on a scale that matches that complexity.”

The result’s greater than a research—it’s a benchmark. A useful resource. And a proof of idea.

“All data from these studies, along with detailed specifications of the tools and protocols used for data collection, are openly accessible to the neuroscience community for further analysis and research,” stated Anne Churchland of UCLA.

What’s Next?

While the challenge targeted on a single decision-making process, the researchers plan to develop their method. Future research might discover how the mind navigates reminiscence, consideration, and even psychological sickness.

Already, the findings may inform analysis into circumstances like autism and schizophrenia, the place disruptions in expectation and prediction might play a task. “Mouse models of autism suggest these animals have difficulties updating their prior expectations,” stated Pouget, “which fits with what we see behaviorally in people.”

More broadly, the IBL hopes to deliver extra scientists into its orbit. “[This] marks a beginning, not the grand finale,” stated Tatiana Engel, a neuroscientist at Princeton. “The IBL has set the highest standards for sharing high-quality data, tools, and resources to accelerate scientific progress. Now, the next horizon is to extend this collective expertise to the entire community.”

The mind, it seems, doesn’t make selections in isolation—and neither ought to science.

The findings are detailed in two companion papers printed in Nature on September 3, 2025: “A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour” and “Brain-wide representations of prior information.”