Of Mice and Men.
Scientists have recorded decision-making activity across nearly the entire mouse brain at single-neuron resolution.
Researchers monitored more than 620,000 neurons in 139 mice while the animals performed a simple visual task: turning a wheel to align a faint grating that appeared on the left or right of a screen. As the grating became harder to detect, mice increasingly relied on prior expectations rather than sensory evidence.
The recordings revealed that decision-making is not a linear process where sensory areas pass clean signals to higher decision centers.
Instead, “priors” from memory and expectation influenced even early sensory activity.
Neural signals moved in waves across the brain, integrating perception, past experience, emotional input, and motor preparation.
This distributed activity shows that decision-making is a whole-brain process, not confined to isolated modules.
The findings challenge traditional models of sequential decision-making and highlight how bias and prior knowledge shape even the earliest stages of perception.
Step 1: Step back
Your heuristic: Pause, create distance, avoid rushing.
Study link: The mice’s brains didn’t instantly “react.” Neural activity propagated through waves across different brain regions, suggesting a natural pause as information and expectations are weighed before committing to action. This “step back” is built into the way brains integrate multiple sources of input.
Step 2: Define the Issue
Your heuristic: Clarify what decision is really about.
Study link: The mice had to interpret: “Is the grating on the left or right?” That’s the core decision. Brain activity first concentrated in sensory areas to represent the immediate issue — but interestingly, even here, expectations (priors) already shaped perception. So “defining the issue” was never purely objective; it was influenced by what the brain expected to see.
Step 3: Assess the Information
Your heuristic: Weigh available evidence.
Study link: Neurons across sensory, memory, and decision regions pooled together the faint visual evidence plus prior knowledge of probability. This parallels how humans assess not just facts but also context, history, and likelihoods.
Step 4: Give a Hearing
Your heuristic: Consider different perspectives, listen to alternatives.
Study link: The study shows decision-making is distributed, not one brain area dictating the outcome. Multiple regions — vision, memory, emotion, motor — all “had their say.” That’s a biological “hearing” process, where diverse inputs contribute before an action is chosen.
Step 5: Check for Bias
Your heuristic: Be aware of distortions or blind spots.
Study link: The role of priors is essentially bias. When the stimulus was faint, the mice leaned heavily on expectation — a “shortcut” that was sometimes wrong. The researchers note that bias permeates even early sensory processing, not just later rational stages. That reinforces the importance of consciously checking bias in human decision-making, since our brains automatically lean on prior experience.
Your heuristic is deliberate and structured, while the study shows the brain’s process is messy and parallel. But the overlap is striking: both involve pausing, framing the issue, integrating evidence with context, hearing multiple “voices,” and managing bias.
The study actually validates your framework by showing it mirrors what the brain is doing — just at an unconscious, distributed level. The difference is that your heuristic makes those steps explicit, so you can manage them more wisely.