Why some people are poor at making decisions

Do you find it difficult to decide what to order for dinner every time you are in a restaurant? If yes, it could be due to interruption in the flow of communication between two areas of the brain which represent our preferences or are involved in action planning, says a new study.

"We discovered that preference-based decisions were less stable if the information flow between the two brain regions was disrupted," said Christian Ruff, a neuroeconomist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

The researchers used transcranial alternating current stimulation, a non-invasive brain stimulation method that enables generation of coordinated oscillations in the activity of particular brain regions.

The participants did not realise that they were being stimulated.

Using this technique, the researchers intensified or reduced the information flow between the prefrontal cortex located directly below the forehead and the parietal cortex just above both ears.

The participants had to make preference-based or purely sensory decisions about food.

The researchers found that when information flow between the two brain regions was disrupted, the participants found it more difficult to state their preferences.

There was no evidence of any gender-specific effects in the experiments.

The findings were detailed in the journal Nature Communications.