A study published today, April 13th, in the journal Nature Neuroscience provides a surprising answer to this question by showing that, rather than committing to a single strategy, the brain can compute multiple alternative decision strategies simultaneously.

The study, led by Fanny Cazettes and senior authors Zachary Mainen and Alfonso Renart, at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, performed a specially-designed experiment which used a kind of “virtual reality” setup for mice, in which the animals were tasked with searching for water in a virtual world. 

In Portugal, the winning scientists are Isabel Gordo (Gulbenkian Institute of Science, IGC), Maria Manuel Mota (João Lobo Antunes Institute of Molecular Medicine, iMM), Mariana Pinho (ITQB-NOVA) and Henrique Veiga-Fernandes (Champalimaud Foundation). Each will receive between €2.5M and €3.5M for the development of research projects over the next five years.

Modern scientific endeavours are often guided by the positivistic ideal of obtaining a neutral, detached point of observation from which truths about the world can be deduced and believed to hold independently of the socio-political context in which they were obtained.