As researchers learn more about brains and how they operate, it’s useful to know how much brain tissue is needed to execute specific jobs – and it turns out that just 302 neurons are needed to make complicated judgments.
A recent study of the predator worm Pristionchus pacificus supports this theory. The worm depends on biting to feast on its prey or guard its food supply, which allowed researchers to study its decision-making.
Instead of searching for indicators of decision taking in neurons and cell interconnections, the researchers looked at P. pacificus’ behavior, especially how it decided to employ its biting ability when faced with various threats. In trials, scientists saw the worm using two distinct techniques with the Caenorhabditis elegans worm, not only its prey but also contender: biting to consume and biting to repel.
P. pacificus opted to bite to kill larval C. elegans because they are simple to overcome. Worms tended to bite adults to drive C. elegans away from food sources. That indicates a strategic shift and a determined decision. Just 302 neurons at your discretion aren’t much — humans have about 86 billion of them. However, scientifically speaking, it seems that the principles of decision-making are fairly straightforward to write.
“Our study shows you can use a simple system such as the worm to study something complex, like goal-directed decision-making,” explained neurobiologist Sreekanth Chalasani.
One area where this new study might assist is artificial intelligence advancement: finding out how to educate computer software to make autonomous judgments with as little engineering and neural network as necessary.
Future studies will examine how much of this judgment call is fixed and how much is malleable in the brains of P. pacificus. Again, this will have ramifications for our knowledge of how we determine our own judgments.
