That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites-Medical Diagnoses

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

What's going on in a doctor's brain when they make decisions? In today's Neuroscience Bite, we discuss the neuroscience of medical decision making. 

Hi, my name is Olov Kurgolson and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another Neuroscience Byte. I've been doing a lot of work with my medical colleagues the last couple of weeks. And we've been talking a lot about work with my medical colleagues the last couple of weeks, and we've been talking a lot about medical decision-making and what's going on in a doctor's brain when they make a decision. Interestingly enough, my own lab sort of looked into this issue a couple of years ago. Essentially, what we did is we had a couple of medical students and a couple of experienced

medical doctors go into an MRI scanner, and then we made them diagnose clinical cases. And what we found was really, really interesting. When we looked at the brain activation of medical students, we found that they had more activation in their left dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. So that pattern of activation that we saw was the medical students really thinking back to the classes that they'd taken and relying on that book-learned information and instructor-learned information to come up with a diagnosis for the case. Now with the experienced medical doctors, we saw more activation on the right prefrontal

cortex and specifically the dorsolateral and ventral lateral prefrontal cortices. And if you again look at the literature and try to interpret what that means, that right activation is more associated with sorting through experience. The doctor is reflecting on the cases that they'd seen over their careers and using that information to come up with a diagnosis. So to summarize this, left side of the prefrontal cortex is you sorting through book learned or studied information, and the right side of the prefrontal cortex is relying on experience. In both cases, an analytical decision, but from a different source of information. Now to be clear, when you make these analytical decisions,

Now, to be clear, when you make these analytical decisions, you sort of do a bit of both. So it's not like we had no right activation for the medical students and no left activation for the medical doctors. It's just the activity was dominated by the book learned experience for the medical students, and it was dominated by personal experience for the medical doctors. And to be clear, this isn't specific to medical decision making. and it was dominated by personal experience for the medical doctors. And to be clear, this isn't specific to medical decision-making. This would apply to any situation in principle where you're relying on something you've learned factually from books or classes or whatever,

or you're relying on your own real-world experiences. That's another neuroscience bite, a little insight into medical decision-making. Remember the website's up, thatneuroscienceguy.com. Links to our YouTube channel, the podcast of course, to my blog, also to Etsy where you can buy That Neuroscience Guy merch and to Patreon where you can support us. Remember, even a dollar a week could make a big difference in a graduate student's life because that's where all the money goes. And of course,

follow me on Twitter, That Neurosag Guy. My name is Olof Kregolsen and I'm That Neuroscience Guy. I'll see you on Sunday for another full episode of the podcast.